of Dreyfus be avenged?  Among a savage tribe which has no marriage, adultery is not a sin, and only the jealousy of a lover protects a woman from abuse:  so in a time which has no criminal court, murder is not a crime, and only the vigilant vengeance of the victim’s people preserves social order.  “What is the most beautiful thing on earth?” said Osiris to Horus.  The reply was, “To avenge a parent’s wrongs,”—­to which a Japanese would have added “and a master’s.”

In revenge there is something 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.