any other aim in life than personal enjoyment.  It was plain to Nekhludoff that these two were richly endowed by nature, and were only neglected and mutilated as plants are sometimes neglected and mutilated.  He also came across a vagabond, and a woman, whose stupidity and apparent cruelty were repulsive, but he failed to find in them that criminal type spoken of by the Italian school.  He only saw in them people who were disagreeable to him personally, like some he had met in dress-coats, uniforms, and laces.

Thus the investigation of the question:  Why are people of such great variety of character confined in prisons, while others, no different than those, enjoy freedom and even judge those people? was the fourth concern of Nekhludoff.

At first he hoped to find an answer to this question in books, and bought every book bearing on the subject.  He bought the works of Lombroso, Garofalo, Ferri, Mandsley and Tard, and read them carefully.  But the more he read them, the greater was his disappointment.  The same thing happened with him that happens with people who appeal to science with direct, simple, vital questions, and not with a view of playing the part of an expounder, writer or teacher in it.  Science solved a thousand and one various abstruse, complicated questions bearing on criminal law, but failed to give an answer to the question he had formed.  His question was very simple:  Why and by what right do some people confine, torture, exile, flog and kill other people no different than they are themselves?  And in answer they argued the questions:  Whether or not man is a free agent?  Can a criminal be distinguished by the measurements of his cranium?  To what extent is crime due to heredity?  What is morality?  What is insanity?  What is degeneracy?  What is temperament?  How does climate, food, ignorance, emulation, hypnotism, passion affect crime?  What is society?  What are its duties? etc., etc.

These arguments reminded Nekhludoff of an answer he had once received from a schoolboy.  He asked the boy whether he had learned the declension of nouns.  “Yes,” answered the boy.  “Well, then decline ‘Paw.’” “What paw?  A dog’s paw?” the boy answered, with a sly expression on his face.  Similar answers in the form of questions Nekhludoff found in scientific books to his one basic question.

He found there many wise, learned and interesting things, but there was no answer to his principal question:  By what right do some people punish others?  Not only was there no answer, but all reasoning tended to explain and justify punishment, the necessity of which was considered an axiom.  Nekhludoff read much, but only by fits and starts, and the want of an answer he ascribed to such superficial reading.  He, therefore, refused to believe in the justice of the answer which constantly occurred to him.

CHAPTER XIX.

The deportation of the party of convicts to which Maslova belonged was set for the fifth of July, and Nekhludoff was prepared to follow her on that day.  The day before his departure his sister, with her husband, arrived in town to see him.