IS DUELLING WRONG?

Right and wrong are not, as some suppose, clearly defined, as are black and white. Right and wrong so overlap that it is difficult, except for a clergyman, to decide which is which. Circumstances may turn the balance, and what is right under some circumstances is very wrong under others.

A man may pose as being very good, whereas he is merely a coward; he may refuse to fight, not because he thinks it wrong to kill, but because he is too cowardly.

Wrong often poses as right.

Right and wrong are chiefly a matter of convention, and vary with different races of men, and at different periods.

What is wrong to-day may be right to-morrow. The list of right and wrong I give below, is only made up to date, and is subject to revision at any time.

Probably by the time this book sees the light, this list may be entirely out-of-date.

In early times holy men did things which would land them in prison if they were alive in these days.

In the cruel ages when men knew no better, St. Francis of Assisi preached (like Buddha) kindness to every living thing, and called the birds “our little brothers.”

In the present superior age, St. Francis would spend his life in prison from inability to pay the fines imposed on him for feeding birds.

Kindness to animals was never a popular virtue. It is considered “soppy,” “sickly sentimentality.”

Men have always liked to bully horses to show what good riders they are, and what “control” they have over them. They think it draws forth admiration to be seen knocking a horse about. It shows their mental superiority over a mere brute.

Small men like to be seen lugging a big good-natured dog along by a chain, threatening him with a whip. It shows their great brain power over mere matter.

The feeding of starving birds in a hard winter and kindness to cats has always been merely tolerated, even before it became a crime to do so.

In the year 1917, in London, a poor old woman went off crying bitterly, unable to pay the fine imposed on her for giving a few crumbs out of her own scanty meal to some birds. But even in less enlightened times, in the days when birds were pitied, such doubtful conduct was not much approved of except in the case of old maids or little girls. The former were also allowed to keep cats and parrots. Such kindness was “too mawkish” for men and boys to stoop to. Boys should only stoop to pick up stones to throw at birds and cats. “Boys will be boys” and it is a pity to spoil their spirit.

Such boys are in their element now.

A great wave has arisen against mawkish sentimentality. Formerly societies were formed to enforce close seasons for birds and animals, to give them a chance to live in peace during the breeding season, and to prevent the extinction of fast vanishing species, and the Clergy instructed their parishioners in kindness to animals and the “mawkish” protection of defenceless rodents during the breeding season.

But this is changed in the present superior age.

Rabbits and hares can now be killed all the year round. A doe rabbit, dying in a snare or steel trap with a broken leg held by sharp steel teeth, lies suckling her young which have come to her, and the young die of starvation when she has died in torture.

Committees are formed in villages, the Vicar as chairman, which give prizes to the boys who destroy the most birds’ nests and kill the parent birds and their young. Little girls are given prizes for killing the most butterflies.

Those children who are too young yet to be able to kill birds are not forgotten. They are given prizes, which they take home to their proud parents, for the greatest number of flies they can kill.

When I was a boy, in the cruel bad times, I was told I would go to a very unpleasant place when I died if I was so wicked and cruel as to kill flies or pull their wings and legs off whilst they were alive.

I understand this game of pulling wings and legs off is also now played by boys with young birds taken out of nests.

How otherwise can two boys fairly divide a nestful of young birds if they are of an uneven number?

I was at a village fÊte where such prizes were given and I expressed surprise that a boy did not get first prize for a very big heap of dead flies. I was told that he had collected the dead flies found on the window ledges the previous autumn, and added them to his heap of kills, so he was not eligible.

It is praiseworthy to kill flies, but wrong to collect those already dead.

I must apologize for this long digression, but it was necessary in order that my following analysis of what is conventionally right and wrong might be properly understood.

As right and wrong at present stand, a man in uniform, if he meets a man in a different uniform (a man, with whom he has no quarrel, and of whose existence he was ignorant up to that moment), and he is told to fight that man, and kills him, he becomes a hero. The more he kills, the greater hero he is.If on the other hand, this man in uniform quarrels with a man in the same uniform as himself, or who is in civilian dress, or if he is himself in civilian dress, and if, as the result of this quarrel they fight (even if a fair fight, with friends of each man present to see that it is a fair fight) and he kills the man, then he is a murderer.

A murderer must be murdered; that is his punishment for murdering a man.

It might be imagined that if the man who murders another has to be murdered himself by another man, who thus also becomes a murderer, it would end by everyone being killed except the last man.

This is not so. When a civilian has murdered another in fair fight, the man appointed to murder this murderer does not become a murderer, he is an executioner, and is paid for murdering the other man, and the incident closes.

Whatever wrong a man receives from another, he must not fight him. He must not even slap his face. That is an assault and wrong.

He must accept a sum of money considered equivalent to the wrong done him.

Some men are not satisfied with this. They consider receiving money from their opponent a degradation, and even the suggestion of such a course, an insult.

In countries where duelling is still allowed, they have a solution—the duel.