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 o