As an offset against the virtue of gratitude must be placed the deep-seated spirit of revenge which animates all classes.  Though not enumerated among their own list of the Seven passions—­joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hatred and desire—­it is perhaps the most over-mastering passion to which the Chinese mind is subject.  It is revenge which prompts the unhappy daughter-in-law to throw herself down a well, consoled by the thought of the trouble, if not ruin, she is bringing on her persecutors.  Revenge, too, leads a man to commit suicide on the doorstep of some one who has done him an injury, for he well knows what it means to be entangled in the net which the law throws over any one on whose premises a dead body may thus be found.  There was once an absurd case of a Chinese woman, who deliberately walked into a pond until the water reached up to her knees, and remained there, alternately putting her lips below the surface, and threatening in a loud voice to drown herself on the spot, as life had been made unbearable by the presence of foreign barbarians.  In this instance, had the suicide been carried out, vengeance would have been wreaked in some way on the foreigner by the injured ghost of the dead woman.

The germ of this spirit of revenge, this desire to get on level terms with an enemy, as when a life is extracted for a life, can be traced, strangely enough, to the practice of filial piety and fraternal love, the very cornerstone of good government and national prosperity.  In the Book of Rites, which forms a part of the Confucian Canon, and contains rules not only for the performance of ceremonies but also for the guidance of individual conduct, the following passage occurs:  “With the slayer of his father, a man may not live under the same sky; against the slayer of his brother, a man must never have to go home to fetch a weapon; with the slayer of his friend, a man may not live in the same state.”  Being now duly admitted among the works which constitute the Confucian Canon, the above-mentioned Book of Rites enjoys an authority to which it can hardly lay claim on the ground of antiquity.  It is a compilation made during the first century B.C., and is based, no doubt, on older existing documents; but as it never passed under the editorship of either Confucius or Mencius, it would be unfair to jump to the conclusion that either of these two sages is in any way responsible for, or would even acquiesce in, a system of revenge, the only result of which would be an endless chain of bloodshed and murder.  The Chinese are certainly as constant in their hates as in their friendships.  To use a phrase from their own language, if they love a man, they love him to the life; if they hate a man they hate him to the death.  As we have already noted, the Old Philosopher urged men to requite evil with good; but Confucius, who was only a mortal himself, and knew the limitations of mortality, substituted for an ideal doctrine the more practical injunction to requite evil with justice.  It is to be feared that the Chinese people fall short in practice even of this lower standard.  “Be just to your enemy” is a common enough maxim; but one for which only a moderate application can be claimed.