Nor let it be said that it is an
unchristian principle; for when I have been smitten on the right or
left cheek (the pain is just the same in either case), before I am
prepared to deliver the return blow so long a time has often elapsed
that all wrathful or revengeful thoughts are over. I strike in such
a case more for the public good than for my own satisfaction, and am
therefore right in calling my motive a principle of action, not an
impulse. It is a very valuable one too, infinitely more effective than
the fantastical code of the duellist, which favours the person who
inflicts the injury, affording him facilities for murdering or maiming
the person injured. It is a weapon invented for us by Nature before
Colonel Colt ever lived, and it has this advantage, that one is
permitted to wear it in the most law-abiding communities as well as
amongst miners and backwoodsmen. If inoffensive people were ever to
cast it aside, then wicked men would have everything their own way and
make life intolerable. Fortunately the evil-doers always have the fear
of this intangible six-shooter before them; a wholesome feeling, which
restrains them more than reasonableness or the law courts, and to which
we owe it that the meek are permitted to inherit the earth. But now
this quarrel was with a whole nation, though certainly not with a very
great one, since the population of the Banda Oriental numbers only
about a quarter of a million.
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