The principle holds good in penal codes everywhere. As a general rule, there is no differentiating treatment, no regard for antecedent conditions of rank, position, or education, and it is argued, no doubt rightly, that the offender of the better class knows better and has no excuse for lapsing into crime. When he falls, it is under the impulse of irresistible evil nature, and his misdeeds will rival the worst. There were five ex-nobles at Omsk, and the majority, three at least, were incorrigible blackguards, criminal to the backbone. Dostoyevski sketches their portraits in a few incisive strokes and in the blackest colours. One was a man who offered the most repulsive example of degradation and baseness to which he may fall whose feeling of honour has perished within him. This youth acted as spy and informer for the governor, to whom, by the intermediary of a servant, he repeated all that was said and done in the prison. It was a base trade which he had adopted when at large in St. Petersburg and before he had completed his studies. Being short of funds, he sold himself to the police authorities after a quarrel with his parents, and betrayed a number of associates to obtain the means for satisfying the grossest and most licentious desires. At last, moved by insatiable greed, he joined in a mad plot which he should have seen was hopeless, for he was not without intelligence, and was arrested, tried and condemned to ten years as a hard-labour convict in Siberia. He accepted his fate without repining; he could fall no lower, and as a convict he might perpetrate any villainies without shame or compunction. “I think of this disgusting creature,” says Dostoyevski, “as of some monstrous phenomenon. During the many years I lived in the midst of murderers, debauchees and proved rascals, never in my life did I meet a case of such complete moral debasement, determined corruption and shameless turpitude.... To me he was never more than a piece of flesh furnished with teeth and a stomach, greedy for the most offensive and ferocious animal enjoyments, and ready to assassinate anyone to compass them. He was a perfect monster, a mere animal restrained by no feelings, no rules of conduct.... Fire, plague, famine, no matter what scourge, is preferable to the presence of such a man in human society.... The common-law convicts maintained friendly relations with him and were more affable with him than with us. They thought nothing of his base actions; espionage and denunciation were in the air as natural products of the place, and the kindly attitude of the authorities, whose creature he was, gave him importance and a certain value in the eyes of his fellows.... He poisoned the first days of my imprisonment and drove me nearly to despair. I was terrified by the mass of baseness and cowardice into which I had been thrown. I imagined that every one else was as foul and contemptible as he.”