Thus public indignation displays itself not only in punishment, but, to a certain extent, in the custom of revenge. In both cases the society desires that the offender shall suffer for his deed. Strictly speaking, the relationship between the custom of revenge and punishment is not, as has been often supposed, that between parent and child. It is a collateral relationship. They have a common ancestor, the feeling of public resentment.
But whilst public opinion demands that vengeance shall be exacted for injuries, it is also operative in another way. Though in some cases the resentment may seem to outsiders to be too weak or too much checked by other impulses, it may in other cases appear unduly great. As a matter of fact, we frequently find the practice of revenge being regulated by a rule which requires equivalence between the injury and the suffering inflicted in return for it. Sometimes this rule demands that only one life shall be taken for one;[75] sometimes that a death shall be avenged on a person of the same rank, sex, or age as the deceased;[76] sometimes that a murderer shall die in the same manner as his victim;[77] sometimes that various kinds of injuries shall be retaliated by the infliction of similar injuries on the offender.[78] This strict equivalence is not characteristic of resentment as such.[79] There is undoubtedly a certain proportion between the pain-stimulus and the reaction; other things being equal, resentment increases in intensity along with the pain by which it is excited. The more a person feels offended, the greater is his desire to retaliate by inflicting counter-pain, and the greater is the pain which he desires to inflict. But resentment involves no accurate balancing of suffering against suffering, hence there may be a crying disproportion between the act of revenge and the injury evoking it.[80] As Sir Thomas Browne observes, a revengeful mind “holds no rule in retaliations, requiring too often a head for a tooth, and the supreme revenge for trespasses, which a night’s rest should obliterate.”[81] If, then, the rule of equivalence is not suggested by resentment itself, this rule must be due to other factors, which intermingle with resentment, and help, with it, to determine the action. One of these factors, I believe, is self-regarding pride, the desire to pull down the humiliating arrogance of the aggressor naturally suggesting the idea of paying him back in his own coin; and it seems probable that the natural disposition to imitate, especially in cases of sudden anger, acts in the same direction. But besides this qualitative equivalence between injury and retaliation, the lex talionis requires, in a rough way, quantitative equivalence, and this demand has no doubt a social origin. If the offender is a person with whose feelings men are ready to sympathise, their sympathy will keep the desire to see him suffer within certain limits; and if, under ordinary circumstances, they tend to sympathise equally with both parties, the injurer and the person injured, and, in consequence, confer upon these equal rights, they will demand a retaliation which is only equal in degree to the offence. By suffering a loss the offender compensates, as it were, for the loss which he has inflicted; and when equal regard is paid to his feelings and to those of his victim, it is deemed just that the loss required of him as a compensation should be equivalent to the loss for which he compensates, anything beyond equivalence being regarded as undeserved suffering. If this explanation is correct, the rule of equivalence must originally have been restricted to offences within the social group; for, according to early custom and law, only members of the same society have equal rights. In speaking of the tit-for-tat system prevalent among the Guiana Indians, Sir E. F. Im Thurn expressly says, “Of course all this refers chiefly to the mutual relations of members of the same tribe.”[82] And when we find savages acting according to the same principle in their relations to other tribes, the reason for this may be sought partly in the strong hold which that principle has taken of their minds, and partly in the dangers accompanying intertribal revenge, which make it desirable to restrict it within reasonable limits.
[75] Krause, Tlinkit-Indianer, p. 245 sq. Macfie, Vancouver Island and British Columbia, p. 470. Foreman, Philippine Islands, p. 213 (Negrito and Igorrote tribes in the province of La Isabela). Low, Sarawak, p. 212 (Dyaks). von Langsdorf, Voyages and Travels, i. 132 (Nukahivans).
[76] Jagor, Travels in the Philippines, p. 213 (Igorrotes). Blumentritt, quoted by Spencer, Principles of Ethics, i. 370 sq. (Quianganes of Luzon). Munzinger, Ostafrikanische Studien, p. 243 (Marea). Koran, ii. 173.
[77] von Martius, op. cit. i. 129 (Brazilian Indians). Wallace, Travels on the Amazon, p. 499 (Uaupés). Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, iii. 246 (Dacotahs). Steller, Kamtschatka, p. 355; Hickson, A Naturalist in North Celebes, p. 198 (Sangirese of Manganitu). Fraser, Journal of a Tour through Part of the Himālā Mountains, p. 339 (Butias). Ellis, History of Madagascar, i. 371. Munzinger, op. cit. p. 502 (Barea and Kunáma). de Abreu, Canary Islands, p. 27 (aborigines of Ferro).
[78] Im Thurn, op. cit. p. 213 sq. (Guiana Indians). Glimpses of the Eastern Archipelago, p. 86 (Bataks). Arbousset and Daumas, Tour to the North-East of the Colony of Good Hope, p. 67 (Mantetis). Munzinger, op. cit. p. 502 (Barea and Kunáma). Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, p. 27 (various other African peoples), de Abreu, op. cit. p. 71 (aborigines, of Gran Canaria).
[79] Cf. Tissot, Le droit pénal, i. 226; Steinmetz, Ethnol. Studien zur ersten Entwicklung der Strafe, i. 401; Makarewicz, op. cit. p. 13.
[80] von Martius, op. cit. i. 128 (Brazilian aborigines). Calder, in Jour. Anthr. Inst. iii. 21 (Tasmanians). Forbes, A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago, p. 473 (Timorese). Sarasin, Forschungen auf Ceylon, iii. 539 (Veddahs). Jacob, Das Leben der vorislâmischen Beduinen, p. 144 sq.
[81] Browne, Christian Morals, iii. 12, p. 94.
[82] Im Thurn, op. cit. p. 214.