PRIVATE VENGEANCE.

THE phrase "wild justice," frequently used in discussing what is called lynch law, is Lord Bacon's, and occurs in his essay "On Revenge." "Revenge," he says, "is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." It is curious that Bacon should have hit speculatively upon an idea which many of our modern verdicts have rendered practical. "The most tolerable sort of revenge," he adds, "is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy; but, then, let a man take heed the revenge be such as there is no law to punish, else a man's enemy is still beforehand, and it is two for one." This suggestion of "wrongs which there is no law to remedy," is a familiar one in men's mouths and in the newspapers at the present time. It is employed oftenest, perhaps, and most effectively in cases affecting the domestic relations, when affront has been offered to conjugal honor, when the virtue of a daughter has been betrayed, or the good reputation of a sister destroyed. When such has been the provocation, the majority seems ready to forget every other consideration, and to forgive the plainest violations of statutes upon the observance of which the peace of society and the safety of life are presumed to depend. This feeling may arise from a lack of confidence in judicial tribunals, as well as from a sense of the necessary incapacity of the law adequately to punish offenses against personal feelings, and especially against personal honor. Usually, however, it is a result of sudden anger, of unbridled indignation, and of impatience of the processes of the law, which, even if they were sure, must inevitably be slow and formal. When it affects considerable bodies of men, they keep each other in countenance. When, as in the case of the Vigilance Committee of San Francisco, it urges all but a mere handful of the inhabitants, there is an abrogation absolute,

however temporary, of all civil government, and the body politic comes near to a resolution into its original elements; though even anarchy pays to legal tribunals the involuntary compliment of preserving their forms.

We have the same violence repeated, under the same forms, in our very court-houses, when jurors, governed by emotion rather than law, render verdicts against all the evidence, which the judges either will not or can not set aside. When a man

plainly guilty of murder is, under one pretense or another, acquitted, lynch law, in a respectable and quiet guise, is morally as rampant as when in some frontier town of the far West all the citizens turn out to hang a gambler or to shoot a horsethief. Indeed, the latter is the more defensible proceeding, because it comes more nearly within the category of self-preservation. When no courts exist, or when the servants of the law are in league with its violators, honest and peaceable men will not be much blamed if they take care of themselves as well as they can. In civilized and well-settled communities there is little danger of such defiance; and nothing is more remarkable than the patience with which for centuries mankind, even in the most enlightened lands, have usually submitted to the delays, the pedantries, the extortions, and the uncertainties of the law. Occasionally, but not often, they have been driven to seek redress in private and unauthorized ways; and it has not seldom occurred that discontented populations have retained a lingering allegiance to the bench long after even a shadow of respect for the throne had disappeared. Respect for and confidence in the judiciary is an Anglo-Saxon instinct. It is therefore of evil import when the right of private vengeance is either theoretically or practically asserted.

Lord Bacon's caution, that the revenge "be such as there is no law to punish," intimates with sufficient clearness that in his time the modern defense of temporary insanity and the modern plea of intolerable provocation were unknown. Men did not then so readily, and by no means with such impunity, take upon themselves the triple office of accuser, judge, and executioner. Assassinations, as the State Trials abundantly show, were not then unknown in England, while the cowardly resource of poisoning, brought there from Italy and France, was occasionally resorted to. But the people of England, always open and frank in seeking restitution or revenge, even by violence, were

still religious enough not to question the prerogative of the Deity, and the words, "Vengeance is mine," had yet a restraining power and were yet reverenced in the courts of justice. While we do not propose to discuss the subject from a religious point of view, it should be considered that he who refuses to put his trust in a divine retribution, sure and sufficient, even when human laws are wanting, or have proved insufficient, substantially accuses God of procrastination, and thus, by arraigning his wisdom, really denies his existence. We have here one of the strongest evidences of the atheism of modern times and of the waning influence of Christianity. Who now, though he be a member of the church, thinks of forgiving his enemy? What now has become of that great doctrine of love, which we are told should be superior to despiteful usance?

A second consideration, rather moral than religious, is that revenge is usually inconsistent with justice, which should be calm and dispassionate, whereas revenge may proceed upon mere conjecture, and be stimulated to violence by furious and uncontrollable wrath. Collins, in the Ode on the Passions, sings of revenge with "each strained ball of sight bursting from his head." One exposed to such mania, who has been taught by long observation that courts will be lenient and that juries will condone, will for that very cause make little or no effort to restrain himself, and will not without reason expect an impunity, whatever he may do, to which he may be little entitled. He has numerous bad examples before him. In many a conversation he has declared what deed of death he would do under such and such circumstances. He has been trained to exaggerate the gravity of certain wrongs, and to think that the world demands of him some extraordinary manifestation; and he feels that should he not give reins to his rage he will be thought but a meanspirited creature. He must commit murder or he must lose caste. He must kill or be sent to Coventry. Such is the morality which bad rulings from the bench, sophistical arguments at the bar, absurd verdicts from the jury-box, inconsiderate pardons from the executive chamber, and hasty generalizations in the newspapers, have taught him. He will be no common felon. He wears a good coat; he is of a respectable family; he is well educated; he is wealthy; he has troops of friends; and, above all, he has been really wronged, or he thinks he has been. He feels that there is a higher law which authorizes him to break

the lower, and he breaks it, while society, not venturing in set terms to applaud the deed, regards him not unkindly, and says: "Poor man! He had great provocation, and we must not be hard upon him!"

Now, we do not mean to say that all this passes seriatim through the mind of a man who, having been, as he thinks, dishonored, proposes to mend the matter by committing murder. On the contrary, he may rush to violence without any reflection of this sort whatsoever. What we do mean to say is that his whole moral nature has been affected disastrously by the general tone of the society in which he has lived, and by the lame and impotent results of many criminal trials the details of which he has read with avidity. Verdicts of "Not Guilty," which should be verdicts of "Guilty," and which the whole world, seriously reflecting, knows to be contrary to the law and the evidence, cannot be frequently rendered, especially in cases that strongly attract public attention, without blunting the general conscience and filling the general mind with loose notions of justice. It is the duty of the law not merely to punish crime, but to promote self-restraint, and if it fails to do the last, it will inevitably find the volume of criminal offenses increasing. Unquestionably the inefficient way in which law has been administered in some parts of this country has, with other causes, greatly impaired the power of self-control. It is not so common as it was to find men governing their passions with absolute sway. The temper of our forefathers may have been as hot as ours, but they knew better how to control it. They had passed, through the influences of civilization and religion, beyond that rude idea of retribution which confounds justice and revenge. They had brought within its due limits the natural impulse to reprisal which marks the savage, who has no doubt of the perfect legality of his vengeance, and who sometimes consummates it by eating of the body of his dead enemy, as the Corsicans sometimes ate the heart of the victim of the vendetta. From a similar feeling arose the custom among barbarians of torturing prisoners of war.

For considerably over two centuries, society in this country, or at least in the northern part of it, seemed to have outgrown that characteristic of human childhood which strikes instinctively when it is angry. Duelling, which was bad, having disappeared in all parts of the country, assassination,

which is infinitely worse, has to a certain extent taken its place, while those whose lack of refinement would forbid them to think of the duel, with all its artificial punctilio, follow the example of their superiors, and resort to murder upon comparatively slight provocation. Morally the crime of either is the same, saving always those extenuations to which a man lacking opportunity in life may possibly be entitled. The gentleman who in a frenzy shoots the destroyer of his domestic happiness, as well as the carter who brains a rival blocking his way, may each be hanged or not hanged; but in either case the mischief is the same and proceeds from the same cause, an unbridled temper. We see this exhibited in a minor way in the quarrels of the Stock Exchange, where bankers sometimes scuffle and pound each other like the veriest blackguards of the slums. We find this exotic ferocity exhibited even by children; and if we go on as we have been going during the last generation, we may, to our sorrow, find it as thoroughly established in the next as it is among the lazzaroni of Naples, or the lascars of the East, or as it was in the Highlands of Scotland in the days of Rob Roy. National character is but an aggregate of personal peculiarities: the last may act upon the first, and the first react upon the last, until that becomes the rule which was the exception, and what was of merely private interest assumes a public importance. We are undoubtedly approaching a period in which the control of the personal passions can alone save us from something very like anarchy. This, however, is a political view of the affair, upon which at present we do not intend to enlarge. There are terrible problems to be solved; Heaven grant that their solution may not be in blood.

In considering the question of private vengeance, as we have already intimated, we have first to take into view those injuries for which the law provides no redress, or none which the world has agreed to consider adequate. At the first glance it is evident that these are necessarily few in number, because the tendency of law-making is to protect the material rights of the individual, and to redress his grievances, whenever it is possible, in a material way. The theory, for instance, is, that the loss of a wife, through her infidelity, is simply a loss of labor and service; and the seduction of a daughter is placed upon the same low ground; but all this, it is evident, is merely a fiction of the law. It is all that it can do. Really, in either case it has nothing to