committed, persuading or compelling the injured party to accept compensations, equivalents, in lieu of revenge.[1] Here lies the reason why those in the habit of practising revenge—those who keep up "blood-feuds," for instance—are reluctant to come under the control of the state, and have to have justice forced upon them.[2] The state makes private injuries offenses against it, and the treatment of them is so far taken out of the jurisdiction of personal feeling; it virtually adopts what Nietzsche calls the oldest, simplest canon of justice, "everything has its price, all can be paid for," and trains its subjects in this objective, impersonal way of looking at things—even influencing, though perhaps least and last of all, the injured person himself.[3] I need not say that so far as men take the law into their own hands, as in parts of our own country, there is reversion to primitive pre-political conditions. As I might put it briefly, under the state justice becomes law (which is far from saying, I need not add, that law is ipso facto justice).
The state, viewing injuries as offenses against itself, punishes them. But Nietzsche notes that as political communities become stronger, they take offenses less seriously, and mitigate their penal codes. A private creditor naturally becomes more humane, as his wealth increases—it may even be a measure of his wealth how much he can lose without appreciably suffering. And a consciousness of power on the part of a political society is not unthinkable, in which it might indulge itself in a luxury than which there could be no greater—that of letting offenders go unpunished. With easy sense of its superiority it might say, "What are these parasites to me?—let them live and thrive. I can stand it." And so the justice that began with the dictum, "Everything is payable, everything must be paid for," would end by looking through its fingers at those who are insolvent and letting them go free—end as all good things on earth do, by abrogating itself (sich selbst aufhebend). There is a beautiful name for this self-abrogation of justice—grace. It is a prerogative of what is mightiest—its beyond law (sein Jenseits des Rechts).[4]
- ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 11.
- ↑ Ibid., II, § 11; cf. also Werke, XIII, 194, § 430, where the point of view of those forced is given.
- ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 11. I need not say that so far as men take the law into their own hands, as in parts of our own country, there is reversion to primitive pre-politieal conditions.
- ↑ Ibid., II, 10.
