THE VENDETTA.
VERY few of the practices which seem irrational, but are found to exist in many tribes at great distances of space and time, are wholly without some explanation in utility, and the vendetta is no exception to the rule. The English, who feel the impulse of revenge less than any other people, are apt to think of the vendetta as springing from "pure cussed- ness," an evil kind of vindictiveness peculiar to certain localities; but although hatred enters into it, the vendetta had its origin in the necessity for self-defence. At a time when murder was frequent, and outrage on women always to be feared, when there were no Judges, no police, and imperfeot tribal organisations, human beings, struggling as, outside Africa, they did everywhere towards some sort of order and security, insisted in the interest of general safety that the family to which the victim belonged should avenge the man's death or the woman's loss of honour. They made the blood fend imperative, and directed that the assassin or the ravisher should be hunted to the death by those most directly affected by the crime. With some tribes compensa- tion was possible, as it is now among Arabs, but with others the rule was absolute,—the killer must be killed. No matter what the original motive of the slayer, there must be blood for blood, or murder would never cease. Nay, retribution must go further than that. It might happen that the guilty person was too well defended to be reached, or he might fly to a distance not to be passed over by his victim's avenger, or, in an age of violence, he might die before retribution could overtake him. In any of these cases his son was liable, or his brother, or, in extreme cases, even his whole family. The object, in short, was to exact the penalty so that it would be felt, and so prevent a recurrence of murder which would necessitate incessant watchfulness, and defensive battle at inconvenient momenta. The system was, in fact, defensive, and has been kept up to this day, though the civilised now entrust its maintenance to Judges and policemen, and relieve the relatives of a duty felt to be so onerous that its performance was insisted on by the greatest of the early penalties, a complete tribal boycott. The man who refused the duty was held to be dishonoured, and as such cut off from human association by a sentence which, as was soon discovered, was worse than death itself. Backed by this tremendous sanction, the law worked success- fully, the murderer was always hunted, and, except on strong provocation or under strong temptation, murder became com- paratively infrequent. So useful was the institution that the Mosaic legislators only mitigated without abolishing it, by the institution of sanctuary cities—an expedient afterwards adopted with modifications by the Christian Church—and that to this hour the great source of order throughout Arabia is the reluctance of the hereditary brigand to arouse the blood feud by murdering the member of any powerful house or clan. He will defeat him in a skirmish or rob him to the skin, but he will not kill him except in fair fight, or subject him to any outrageous insult. Of course, the system was originally imperfect, as it dispensed with full proof of guilt, and, of coarse also, abuses arose in it, the greatest being the habit which sprang up of considering the avenger of blood a just subject for the blood feud,—an innovation which made it possible that the duty of the vendetta might fall on the relatives not only of the original victim, but of him who suf- fered for the crime of killing him, and might thus cover whole tribes and descend for generations, like the feuds between nations which have lasted centuries. Still, the original idea was sound, and limited the practice of murder, and it lasted therefore almost everywhere till superseded by more regular plans of defence and vengeance. When they came in, whether in the shape of Roman law, or the feudal system,or the modern methods of police, the practice,w hich was excessively inconvenient and burdensome, died away so utterly that men could hardly believe it ever existed, and came to regard the tribes which retained it as exceptionally malignant and ferocious. The Corsicans are so regarded all over the Mediterranean, and so are certain Northern tribes, who still keep up the old practice, regarded throughout India. It seems as monstrous to a respectable Hindostanee that an Afridi should hunt down the slayer of his brother or that slayer's nearest kinsman, as it seems to a respectable German or Englishman that an Albanian whose relative has been killed by a Turkish Vizier should shoot that Vizier's son. Indeed, even the scum of Constantinople were moved by an incident of the kind which occurred within the last few days, and wondered whether, after all, the Judge would not let the assassin go lest he himself should become a subject of a hereditary vendetta. As is natural, the custom, being now infrequent and confined to certain districts, has become an object of wonder and, as is always the case when wonder is excited, of exaggeration and romance. It never was observed any where with complete strictness, or a whole population must have been subjected to periodic thinning, and we suspect that pursuit was often very slow, that excuses for slowness were accepted. with some readiness, and that the assassin,
unless his crime was unusually gross, very often escaped.
When, as has occasionally happened, whole families have been doomed, it will be found, we believe, on careful investi- gation, either that a question of property was involved, and it was necessary to kill heirs, or that the sentenced family was exceptionally obnoxious, or that it had actually assisted in the original offence. Of course, with revenge elevated into a duty, tempers grew stern and savage, and the fear of reprisals operated to extend the area of slaughter; but the "supreme vendetta," in which all descendants of the original criminal were supposed to be hunted to all time, was, we fancy, very rare indeed. A family might have in certain cases to take especial care of itself if it visited certain places, as was, indeed, a century ago the case with certain Highland and Irish families, without being exactly liable to be killed at sight.
We wonder whether men have become so much better that the passion of revenge is now more lightly felt, or whether it has been restrained, first, by the possibility of securing legal retribution for wrong suffered, and, secondly, by the immense decline in concentration of thought produced by the increase, the almost infinite increase, in the interests of the modern man. We should be very sorry to trust men of the brooding temper if legal redress were entirely unprocurable.
The writer had an interview once with an entirely respectable and educated man who thought himself injured by a Judge, and he was so impressed with the feeling that revenge might even produce murder that, but for an accident, he would have written to the Judge, though totally unknown to him, to warn him that he was seriously threatened, the result of that accident being that the Judge was next day in most serious danger of his life. He reads every month of some case in which a workman or labourer has tried to kill, or has actually killed, some rival, or some foreman, or some one who has superseded him, in revenge, as the assassin con- fesses, for depriving him of his place, and doubts if the vendetta is extinct even in easy-going England. On the Continent it is terribly frequent, and to judge by the verdicts, is not regarded as altogether unnatural or base. It is not confined to the ignorant either, being the grand moving cause of all serious duels, one half of which at least are prompted much more by the desire to punish a wrong, real or supposed, than by the wounded vanity to which in England they are always attributed. Human nature changes very slowly— we quite admit that it does change—and the desire to be " even " with the wrongdoer is even now, we sus- pect, when legal redress cannot be obtained, with some men intensely strong. Certain changes have, however, undoubtedly occurred,, one of them of a singularly com- plete kind. The notion of conjoint responsibility has been exploded altogether. We cannot recall a case in which a murderer, prompted by the desire for vengeance, has killed a relative of the object of his enmity as a satisfaction to him- self. He may have killed him or her as a dangerous witness,
or an obstacle in the way of an inheritance—the Rush case—
but not in satisfaction of his own feeling of revenge. There is also an increasing reluctance to take life. The unswerving severity of the law has sharpened all consciences on that point, and very bad men recoil from bloodshed with a shudder which is not altogether caused by fear of the gallows. They require support from opinion before they will kill. When they have that, as in Ireland when the secret agrarian law has been broken, or in France when they can plead a romantic reason, or in England when Trade-Union laws are seriously defied, they are apt to resort to the old vendetta in the old way. And lastly, there is nothing like the old persistence in revenge. The mind, as we have said, has so•many interests, that after a time even a deadly malignity dies out, leaving behind it only a cold dis- like, hardly explicable even to the man who feels it. There is more forgiveness of injuries, we hope; there is more for- getfulness of them, we are certain ; and though the habit of forgetting does not improve the character as the habit of forgiving does, it works just as directly for the cause of civilisation. "I'd a killed un if we'd met a month agone," says the angry ruffian, but the interval, though it has left him sore, has blunted the edge of his purpose. Very few English- men, indeed very few Europeans, have now the mental power to carry out a vendetta. Jews, it is said, sometimes display it, but then, unless they are Nihilists, they do not kill.
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