Robert A. Heinlein is famous for coining the phrase "An armed society is a polite society", and rightly so. However, I've been re-reading Richard Burton's "The Book Of The Sword", published in 1884, and in his Introduction I found the following paragraph.
And now when the vain glory of violence has passed away from the Sword with the customs of a past age, we can hardly ignore the fact that the manners of nations have changed, not for the best. As soon as the Sword ceased to be worn in France, a Frenchman said of his compatriots that the 'politest people in Europe had suddenly become the rudest.' That gallant and courteous bearing, which in England during the early nineteenth century so charmed the 'fiery and fastidious Alfieri,' lingers only amongst a few. True the swash-buckler, the professional duellist, has disappeared. But courtesy and punctiliousness, the politeness of man to man, and respect and deference of man to woman - that Frauencultus, the very conception of the knightly character - have to a great extent been 'improved off.' The latter condition of society, indeed, seems to survive only in the most cultivated classes of Europe; and, popularly, amongst the citizens of the United States, a curious oasis of chivalry in a waste of bald utilitarianism - preserved not by the Sword but by the revolver. Our England has abolished the duello without substituting aught better for it: she has stopped the effect and left the cause.
Interesting that he pre-dates Heinlein by most of a century, and uses rather more words, but says basically the same thing. Interesting historical point of view, too.
