Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/166

 a well-attended school and a substantial income from the lord of a fief, might find himself discredited for carrying on the former and deprived of the latter, in the sequel of an encounter with some itinerant expert. But that was not considered any excuse for showing resentment towards his conqueror.

On the other hand, the law did not give itself any concern to punish lapses from the code of true manliness. Again and again crimes were perpetrated which in the West would be designated wilful and brutal murder. Yet the family or relatives of the victim seldom or never thought of invoking public justice upon the perpetrator. His punishment was undertaken by the nearest of kin to the murdered man. He became the object of a vendetta, and a wonderful measure of untiring patience and fierce resolve was often shown in hunting him down. The records teem with instances of men who spent long years tracking the assassin of a father or a brother from fief to fief and province to province, and wreaking vengeance on him eventually, sometimes by means as surreptitious as those he had himself employed to perpetrate his crime, but generally in fair combat. The principle of the vendetta had been inculcated by the teaching of Confucius. That philosopher laid down a rule that no man should live under the same sky with the slayer of his father. Apter disciples of such a creed could scarcely have been found than the Japanese. Even