“An expression used during our conversation the other day leads me for a moment into the deeper and wider significance of this question. It was the expression ‘a downright enemy of society’ used of a certain class of prisoner. I have been thinking over that phrase ‘a downright enemy of society’ to see if one more meditation on it would correct the conclusions of a hundred previous meditations, but I do not feel that it has. I think of it like this: Every now and then, seldom enough but still too frequently, we come across children, in all classes, who, from the age when they begin to act at all, show that there is something in them warped, distorted, inherently inimical to goodness. It is in them, of them, a taint in their blood, a lesion of their brain. They grow up. They are not insane, but they have a blind spot, a place in their souls or internal economy—or whatever you like to call it—that some mysterious, rather awful, hand has darkened. They are doomed from their birth by reason of that blind spot sooner or later to become criminals, that is, to commit some action which is not consonant with the actions of those who are born without this blind spot; some are not found out, some are. When found out they are known as ‘the criminal type.’ They form a portion, not perhaps a very large one, of our convicts. Can those, who have had the good fortune to be born like their fellows, punish these unfortunates _for the sake of punishing them_, for the sake of avenging society? I cannot bring myself to think so. “These are not, however, the bulk of our convicts. The greater part of them are those who are born more or less normal, but with what is called a weak character.[5] I don’t know if you have ever been much amongst those classes which supply the vast proportion of our criminals; if you have, you will recognize, as I do, what a wonderful thing it is that so small a proportion of them become criminals. You will have seen the very dreadful struggle they have against luck from the time when they begin to know anything. You will feel, as I do, that keeping their heads above water is, and must be, touch and go with them from day to day; they’ve just a plank between them and going down, and a very little extra sea (it runs high all the time) tips that plank over. Many of them are bred in slums and garrets where the only real God is Drink. When they go under, they are suddenly up against the most inexorable thing in life, Law and Order, to whose mercilessness every citizen subscribes in self-defence, whether he will or no. When they have paid their debt to Law, they emerge into the same conditions against which they were too weak by nature to stand up before, with the one weapon they had, character, either gone or gravely damaged. It is not remarkable that they go down again, and then again, and so on, until they become ‘enemies of society.’