Revenge. 229 
forego all personal retaliation for injuries sustained and 
delegate the infliction of punishment to the body politic. 
This is no doubt an enormous advance on the barbarous 
principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and 
marks a most important step in the evolution of human 
morals. Still, there are many well-dressed and educated 
people among us who cannot think of an execution without 
a feeling of gratification hardly distinguishable from the 
savage instinct of personal vengeance, even when the murderer’ 
is totally unknown to them. We see the same spirit in those 
occasional outbursts of savagery called “Lynch Law.” The 
primitive impulse in man to inflict, by his own hand, a corre- 
sponding or equivalent injury on one who has wronged him 
cannot be entirely dispensed with. It is necessary to the 
survival of the individual. Retribution, then, is the first step 
in the dealings of man with man on which our entire ethical 
system of abstract justice is founded. 
It would be easy to show how, in many classes of animals, 
there is an incipient advance beyond the principle of personal 
retaliation. One intensely hot day in the summer of 1884, I 
was lying in the shade, watching a troop of horses greatly 
tormented by the flies. Among them was one individual of 
aggressive disposition, who would quietly walk up and give 
one or other of the troop a sharp nip with his teeth. For 
full half an hour this went on, until probably most of them 
had suffered from the annoyance. At first the individual 
attacked had to deal retributively with the matter unassisted; 
but at length a sort of public opinion seemed to have been 
formed, and four or five of the troop attacked the offender 
simultaneously, and drove him out from among them. After 
this he did not return. No one will suppose that any idea of 
abstract justice was involved in this, but it was a clear case 
of the community, or a section of it, acting against one of 
its members in the common interest—the first step in a 
judicial system; and by no other gradations can one conceive 
a human community rising to the comprehension of the moral 
