“Such are the conditions of the development of the criminal classes, that is to say of the classes where we meet the tendency to crime. And it is of importance to remark that we can determine their legal character; they are the vagrants and delinquents by profession. They are clearly differentiated from the vagabonds and delinquents by accident. This distinction, which modern statistics has brought into relief, is now the basis of penal science, and the judge can no longer overlook it. “The occasional delinquents constitute the minority, their life is regular, their instincts are right; a sudden passion, an unpremeditated outburst, a passing depression of the will, leads them into crime; a sort of fever dominates them and, the fit once past, their normal life takes up its course again. “On the other hand, the professional delinquents, who make up the largest part of the population of the prisons, are really the criminal class. They are the hardened, the incorrigible, the recidivists. They form, by the side of regular society, the great rebel tribe, where gather and mingle poverty, ignorance, vice, idleness, and prostitution. The soldiers of this army obey, not a momentary desire, but a permanent tendency. They do not always commit crime for crime’s sake, but the most trivial incident drives them to it; they profit by every opportunity, and we can say that, as in certain circles virtue is a reflex act, so crime is a reflex act with them. Further, they have, quite like the civilized world, a public opinion which supports them, arouses them, gives them their own kind of popularity, and constitutes, in a word, an incentive for the heroes of vice, just as the other public opinion encourages the soldiers of duty. “What is true of criminal society as a whole, is equally true of the individual as such. In each infraction of the law, besides the accidental factor, i.e. age, character, temperament, in a word, the personal disposition, there is the collective or social factor, i.e. the environment, the permanent conditions, the general laws. With the occasional delinquent the individual factor predominates, it is especially the man that appears. With the habitual delinquent, it is the social factor, the collectivity that comes upon the scene. “In the well-to-do, polished, educated classes, who have lacked nothing and have had the benefit of civilizing influences from the cradle, the fault is chiefly personal, and it is the exception. In the lower strata, where everything is lacking, where, to combat evil, men have neither in the present, social protection, nor in the past, the generations of ancestors who have enjoyed power, wealth, and education, it is chiefly collective. In this sense, then, the collective forces have a dominant action in criminality; in order to combat it these must be attacked, and the legislator finds in the law only a blunted weapon if he does not understand this supreme truth, the social character of criminality.” [181]