Page:Melville Davisson Post--The Man of Last Resort.djvu/11



N this fin-de-siècle time, society has grown liberal, it is said, and yet he who thrusts a lever under sage customs, or he who points out the vice of institutions long established, may deem himself happy if he be permitted to strip against the duellist rather than the mob. Even if one come new into the courts of the literati with a cloak dyed a different hue from his fellows, he will scarcely have passed the doorway ere the taunting challenge, "Do you fight, my lord?"

The author, in a previous volume entitled The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, pointed out certain defects in the criminal law, and demonstrated how the skilful rogue could commit not a few of the higher crimes in such a manner as to render the law powerless to punish him. The suggestion was, it seems,