And now we get back from words to human nature--Is the criminal so because he wants to be so? No, and No, and No again. No such wicked fallacy was ever foisted upon a credulous world as this. Nobody at any period of the world ever wished to be criminal. Everyone instinctively hates and fears crime; everyone is honest by nature; it is inherent in the soul. I have never met a criminal that did not hate his crime even more than his condemners hate it. The apparent exceptions are when a man does not consider his act a crime; he has killed because his victim exasperated him to it; he has robbed society because society made war on him. The offender hates his crime. "But he is not ashamed of it." Now that is true. He is not ashamed of it in the current sense. He hates it; he fears it; but it does not fill him with a sense of sin. "Therefore," says the purist, "he has a hardened conscience. It is his conscience, as I said, that is at fault." But the purist is wrong. He does not understand the criminal. He has never tried to understand him as I have tried. What the criminal feels towards his crime is what the sick man feels towards the delirium that seizes him--what the "possessed of devils" feels towards the possession when it comes. It terrifies him; he knows he must succumb; he fears not the mere penalty, but the crime. But he is not ashamed, because he knows he cannot help it. And punishment exasperates him because he has not deserved it, and it will do him harm, not good. He wants to be cured--not made a fit dwelling for still worse devils. And that is what punishment does. The effect of punishment in deterring a criminal from repeating his crime is small. All study of criminal facts proves this. It generally makes him more prone to crime, not less; and all the great crimes are committed by men who have been still further ruined in gaols. What good effect punishment may have is mainly exercised on other than the criminal. Punishment has some effect, but how much we do not yet know, because the matter has never been investigated, and it is not on the patient. Crime is a disease, and will you stop a fever by punishing the patients? Whatever good gaols do lies in the fact that they isolate the unhealthy from the healthy and so stop for a time infection, as do hospitals with disease. But the hospitals do not discharge the patient till he is cured; the gaol aggravates the liability to the disease and turns out the sufferer worse than before. Let us go back. A man is criminal not because he wishes to be so, but because he cannot resist the temptation. He lacks will. True, but it is the ability he lacks, not the wish. Why does he lack ability? This brings us to the second theory of crime--a new one--that criminals are born, not made. The tendency to crime is said to be inherent, to be a reversion, to be inherited. That explains why it is generally incurable when once contracted.