Woe's the day, he sadly said, With a slowly shaking head, And a look of pity: Wry's honest lord reviled, Mock of knave and sport of child, In his own good city.
Speak the word, and master mine, As we charged on Tilly's line And his Walloon lancers, Smiting through their midst, we'll teach Civil look and decent speech To these boyish prancers.
--What then is to be done? for the question is a serious one. We all feel that personal indignity is of all wrongs the hardest one to bear; we know that it is a wrong of a kind that cannot be redressed by law; and yet we restrain men from the only redress, "satisfaction," as it is called, that human ingenuity has bean able to devise, and with which human nature, of the unregenerate sort, is satisfied. We cannot expect all men to behave like members of the Society of Friends. All men have not proved their courage and high spirit like Barclay of Wry, who
----stood Ankle deep in Lutzen's blood With the great Gustavus.
We cannot compel all men to be Christians; and yet we would compel them by law to bear insult as if they were Christians and great captains turned Quakers. We can do this, which thus far society has neglected to do: we can put a social ban upon the man who deliberately offers a personal indignity to another. This should be a social duty. Let it be understood, according to one of those silent social laws which are the most binding of all laws because the sheriff cannot enforce them, that the man who flourishes a horsewhip over another's head, or who uses his tongue as a scourge with like purpose, or who offers personal indignity of any kind, insults society as well as his victim, and is not to be pardoned until he has made the amend to the injured party, and there would soon be an end of provocation to duelling, except that which touches the family, and that cannot be done away with until men have so developed morally and intellectually that they see that a man's honor is not in the keeping of a woman, not in that of any other person than himself, not even his wife. Her conduct may indeed involve his dishonor, if he is what used to be called a wittol, but even then _his_ dishonor is because of his own disgrace. Only then can we reconcile the making of a challenge a felony with the feeling that a man who has had a personal indignity put upon him has suffered the deepest wrong he could be called upon to bear, yet a wrong which society fails to right while it forbids him to seek the only reparation.