which satisfies one's sense of justice.
The avenger reasons:--"My good father did not deserve death. He who
killed him did great evil. My father, if he were alive, would not
tolerate a deed like this: Heaven itself hates wrong-doing. It is the
will of my father; it is the will of Heaven that the evil-doer cease
from his work. He must perish by my hand; because he shed my father's
blood, I, who am his flesh and blood, must shed the murderer's. The same
Heaven shall not shelter him and me." The ratiocination is simple and
childish (though we know Hamlet did not reason much more deeply),
nevertheless it shows an innate sense of exact balance and equal justice
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Our sense of revenge is as
exact as our mathematical faculty, and until both terms of the equation
are satisfied we cannot get over the sense of something left undone.

In Judaism, which believed in a jealous God, or in Greek mythology,
which provided a Nemesis, vengeance may be left to superhuman agencies;
but common sense furnished Bushido with the institution of redress as a
kind of ethical court of equity, where people could take cases not to be
judged in accordance with ordinary law. The master of the forty-seven
Ronins was condemned to death;--he had no court of higher instance to
appeal to; his faithful retainers addressed themselves to Vengeance, the
only Supreme Court existing; they in their turn were condemned by common
law,--but the popular instinct passed a different judgment and hence
their memory is still kept as green and fragrant as are their graves at
Sengakuji to this day.

Though Lao-tse taught to recompense injury with kindness, the voice of
Confucius was very much louder, which counselled that injury must be
recompensed with justice;--and yet revenge was justified only when it
was undertaken in behalf of our superiors and benefactors. One's own
wrongs, including injuries done to wife and children, were to be borne
and forgiven. A samurai could therefore fully sympathize with Hannibal's
oath to avenge his country's wrongs, but he scorns James Hamilton for
wearing in his girdle a handful of earth from his wife's grave, as an
eternal incentive to avenge her wrongs on the Regent Murray.

Both of these institutions of suicide and redress lost their _raison
d'etre_ at the promulgation of the criminal code. No more do we hear of
romantic adventures of a fair maiden as she tracks in disguise the
murderer of her