consolation in this fact, like the unhappy victims of famous
freebooters such as Jack Sheppard or Charley Peace.

But do not let us flatter ourselves. Do not let us, in all the
pomp and circumstance of stately history, blind ourselves to the
fact that the crimes of Frederick, or Napoleon, or their
successors, are in essence no different from those of Sheppard or
Peace. We must not imagine that the bad man who happens to
offend against those particular laws which constitute the
criminal code belongs to a peculiar or atavistic type, that he is
a man set apart from the rest of his fellow-men by mental or
physical peculiarities. That comforting theory of the Lombroso
school has been exploded, and the ordinary inmates of our prisons
shown to be only in a very slight degree below the average in
mental and physical fitness of the normal man, a difference
easily explained by the environment and conditions in which the
ordinary criminal is bred.

A certain English judge, asked as to the general characteristics
of the prisoners tried before him, said: "They are just like
other people; in fact, I often think that, but for different
opportunities and other accidents, the prisoner and I might very
well be in one another's places." "Greed, love of pleasure,"
writes a French judge, "lust, idleness, anger, hatred, revenge,
these are the chief causes of crime. These passions and desires
are shared by rich and poor alike, by the educated and
uneducated. They are inherent in human nature; the germ is in
every man."

Convicts represent those wrong-doers who have taken to a