Hiram Stanley, too, quoting Junker's statement regarding the pigmies of Africa, that "they are much feared for their revengeful spirit," 1 observes that, "other things being equal, the most revengeful are the most successful in the struggle for selfconservation and self-furtherance.” 2 This evolutionist theory of revenge has been criticised by Dr. Steinmetz, but in my opinion with no success. He remarks that the feeling of revenge could not have been of any use to the animal, even though the act of vengeance might have been useful. But this way of reasoning, according to which the whole mental life would be excluded from the influence of natural selection, is based on a false conception of the relation between mind and body, and, ultimately, on a wrong idea of cause and effect. 4 From non-moral resentment we shall pass to the emotion of moral indignation. That this is closely connected with anger is indicated by language itself: we may feel indignant on other than moral grounds, and we may feel righteous anger." The relationship between these emotions is also conspicuous in their outward expressions, which, when the emotion is strong enough, present similar characteristics. When possessed with strong moral indignation, a person looks as if he were angry, and so he really is, in the wider sense of the term. This relationship has not seldom been recognised by moralists, though it has more often been forgotten. Some two thousand years ago Polybius wrote :-" If a man has been rescued or helped in an hour of danger, and, instead of showing gratitude to his preserver, seeks to do him harm, it is clearly probable that the rest will be displeased and offended with him when they know it, sympathising with their neighbour and imagining themselves in his case. Hence arises a notion in every breast of the meaning and theory of duty, which is in fact the beginning and end of justice.' (Hartley regarded resentment and gratitude 5 1 Junker, Travels in Africa during the Years 1882-1886, p. 85. 2 Hiram Stanley, op. cit. p. 180. Cf. also Guyau, Esquisse d'une Morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 162 sq. 3 Steinmetz, Ethnol. Studien, &c. i. 135. 4 Notice, for instance, Michelangelo's Moses. 5 Polybius, Historiae, vi. 6. as "intimately connected with the moral sense."1 Adam Smith made the resentment of "the impartial spectator a corner-stone of his theory of the moral sentiments." Butler found the essential difference between sudden and deliberate anger to consist in this, that the "natural proper end" of the latter is "to remedy or prevent only that harm which implies, or is supposed to imply, injury or moral wrong. And to Stuart Mill, the sentiment of justice, at least, appeared to be derived from "the animal desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself, or to those with whom one sympathises." 4 "3 Moral indignation, or disapproval, like non-moral resentment, is a reactionary attitude of mind directed towards the cause of inflicted pain. In a subsequent chapter we shall see that both are in a similar way determined by the answer given to the question, What is the cause of the pain? a fact which, whilst strongly confirming their affinity, throws light upon some of the chief characteristics of the moral consciousness. (Nay, moral indignation resembles non-moral resentment even in this respect that, in various cases, the aggressive reaction turns against innocent persons who did not commit the injury which gave rise to it. The collective responsibility assumed in certain types of blood-revenge is an evidence of this in so far as such revenge is not merely a matter of individual practice, but has the sanction of custom. And even punishment, which, in the strict sense of the term, is a more definite expression of public, or moral, indignation than the custom of private retaliation, is often similarly indiscriminate. Like revenge, and for similar reasons, punishment sometimes falls on a relative of the culprit in cases when he himself cannot be caught. In Fiji, says Mr. Williams, the virtue of vicarious suffering is recognised." It once happened that a warrior left his charged musket so 1 Hartley, Observations on Man, i. 520. 2 Adam Smith, op. cit. passim. 3 Butler, op. cit. p. 458. Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 79. carelessly that it went off and killed and wounded some individuals, whereupon he fled himself. His case was judged worthy of death by the chiefs of the tribe, and the offender's aged father was in consequence seized and strangled.' 2 In other cases an innocent person is killed for the offence of another, not because the offender cannot be seized, but with a view to inflicting on him a loss, according to the rule of like for like. The punishment, then, is meant for the culprit, though the chief sufferer is somebody else. According to the Laws of Hammurabi, “if a builder has built a house for a man and has not made strong his work, and the house he built has fallen, and he has caused the death of the owner, that builder shall be put to death." But "if he has caused the son of the owner of the house to die, one shall put to death the son of that builder." Similarly, "if a man has struck a gentleman's daughter and caused her to drop what is in her womb, he shall pay ten shekels of silver for what was in her womb." But "if that woman has died, one shall put to death his daughter." The following custom which Mr. Gason reports as existing among the Australian Dieyerie, in case a man should unintentionally kill another in a fight, is probably based on a similar principle :"Should the offender have an elder brother, then he must die in his place; or, should he have no elder brother, then his father must be his substitute; but in case he has no male relative to suffer for him, then he himself must die." 4 This extreme disregard of the suffering of guiltless persons is probably not so much due to downright callousness as to a strong feeling of family solidarity? The same feeling is very obvious in those numerous instances in which both the criminal himself and members of his family are implicated in the punishment. 1 Williams and Calvert, Fiji, p. 24. 2 Laws of Hammurabi, 229 sq. 3 Ibid. 209 sq. Gason, Manners and Customs of the Dieyerie Tribe,' in Woods, Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 265. Among the Atkha Aleuts, the punishment for certain offences was sometimes carried so far as to include the wife of the offender.1 Among the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast, "a person found guilty of having procured, or endeavoured to procure, the death of another through the agency of the gods Huntin and Loko, is put to death, and his family is generally enslaved as well."2 Among the Matabele, if a person is declared by the witch-doctor to have caused injury to somebody else by making charms, he "is immediately put to death, his wife and the whole of his family sharing his fate." Among the Shilluks of the White Nile, "murder is punished with death to the criminal and the forfeiture of wives and children to the Sultan, who retains them in bondage." 4 Among the Kafirs, in cases of trespasses against the king, the sentence falls not only on the individual, but on his whole house. In Madagascar, the code of native laws, up to recent time, reduced for many offences the culprit's wife and children to slavery. In some parts of the Malay Archipelago, according to Crawfurd, a father and child are considered almost inseparable, hence when the one is punished the other seldom escapes. In Bali, the law prescribes that for certain kinds of sorcery the offender shall be, put to death. It adds, "If the matter be very clearly made out, let the punishment of death be extended to his father and his mother, to his children and to his grand-children; let none of them live; let none connected with one so guilty remain on the face of the land, and let their goods be in like manner confiscated." 8 The Chinese doctrine of responsibility is to a great extent based upon family solidarity; in great crimes all the male relatives of the offender are held responsible for his deed. Every male relative, of whatever degree, who may be dwelling under the roof of a man guilty of treason, is doomed to death, with the exception of young boys, who are allowed their lives, but on the condition that they are made eunuchs for service in the imperial palace. In ancient Mexico, traitors and conspirators were not only themselves killed, but their children and relatives 1 Petroff, 'Report on Alaska,' in Tenth Census of the United States, p. 158. 2 Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, p. 225. 3 Decle, Three Years in Savage Travels in Central 5 Ratzel, History of Mankind, ii. 445. 6 Sibree, The Great African Island, p. 181. Ellis, History of Madagascar, i. 174, 175, 193. 7 Crawfurd, op. cit. i. 82. 9 Douglas, Society in China, p. 71 sq. Ta Tsing Leu Lee, sec. ccliv. p. 270. 7 were made slaves to the fourth generation.1 According to an Athenian law, a man who committed sacrilege or betrayed his country was banished with all his children.2 Aristotle mentions a case of sacrilege in which "the bones of the guilty dead were disentombed and cast beyond the borders of Attica; the living clan were condemned to perpetual exile, and the city was subsequently purified." The Macedonian law involved in punishment the kindred of conspirators against the monarch. Dionysius of Halicarnassus states that some of the Greeks "think it reasonable to put to death the sons of tyrants together with their fathers, whereas others punish them with perpetual banishment"; and he contrasts this with the Roman principle that "the sons shall be exempted from all punishment, whose fathers are offenders, whether they happen to be the sons of tyrants, of parricides, or of traitors."5 But after the end of the Marsic, and civil wars, this rule was transgressed; and later on Arcadius, though expressly ordaining that the punishment of the crime shall extend to the criminal alone, took a different view of the punishment for treason. By a special extension of his imperial clemency, he allows the sons of the criminal to live, although in strict justice, being tainted with hereditary guilt, they ought to suffer the punishment of their father. But they shall be incapable of inheritance; they shall be abandoned to the extreme of poverty and perpetual indigence; they shall be excluded from all honours and from the participation of religious rites; the infamy of their father shall ever attend them, and such shall be the misery of their condition, that life shall be a punishment, and death a comfort. Among the Anglo-Saxons, before the time of Cnut, the child, even the infant in the cradle, was liable to be sold into slavery for the payment of penalties incurred by the father, being "held by the covetous to be equally guilty as if it had discretion." Even later, the child of an outlaw, following the condition of the father, also became an outlaw; and this grievance was only partly remedied by Edward the Confessor, who relieved from the consequences of the father's outlawry such children as were born before he was 1 Bancroft, Native Races of the Paci fic States, ii. 459. 2 Meursius, Themis Attica, ii. 2, in Gronovius, Thesaurus Graecarum Antiquitatum, v. 1968. Aristotle, De republica Atheniensium, I. Cf. ibid. 20. * Curtius Rufus, De gestis Alexandri Magni, vi. 11. 20. 9 |