As was said of old time, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," so the Chinese still recognize the principle that the penalty to be paid for crime need not be visited on the criminal himself, but that the substitution of an innocent for a guilty person to bear the award of the law may satisfy all the demands of justice. In the embarrassments of the imperial treasury during the last war, proclamations of the emperor frequently appeared in the _Peking Gazette_, authorizing the commutation of the judicial sentences which inflicted personal punishment by the payment of sums of money, to be estimated according to the gravity of the offence, and the rank or opulence of the offender. Men are to be found as candidates for the scaffold when a large remuneration is offered for the sacrifice of life--to such a sacrifice posthumous honor is frequently attached--a family is rescued from poverty, and enters on the possession of comparative wealth. The ordinary price paid for a man's life is a hundred ounces of pure silver, of the value of about £33 sterling. In the Buddhist code such an act of devotion and self-sacrifice ranks very high in the scale of merits, and would ensure a splendid recompense in the awards of the tribunal which is, after death, to strike the balance of good and evil, when every individual's mortal history is to be the subject of review. Some illustrations may not be unwelcome. In the history of the intercourse of the East India Company with the Chinese, it will be found that the authorities were never satisfied with the averment that the individual charged with offences could not be found; they always insisted that some English subject could be found and delivered over to the penalties of the law. They invariably took high ground; asserted that the laws of China must be respected in China, and that those laws provided a certain and always applicable punishment by which the demands of justice might and ought to be satisfied. They turned a deaf ear to the representation that, according to European law, the individual who had committed a crime was the only proper person to be punished for that crime, and considered it a sort of "barbarian" notion that any crime should be passed over without being followed by the appropriate penalty visiting somebody or other. The theory fills the whole field of penal legislation. Households, villages, and even districts are made responsible for offences committed within their boundaries; and it is not unusual for high functionaries to be called upon to suffer for misdeeds not their own, which no vigilance could prevent and no sacrifices repair. There ought, say the sages, to be no wrong without a remedy, no sin without consequent suffering; and it is better that an innocent man should now and then be sacrificed than that guilt should not necessarily and inevitably be followed by penal consequences.