ed all the characteristics of the criminaloid:
repentance, the desire to confess, irreproachable antecedents, a strong
incentive to dishonesty, and great intelligence.

Although the damage inflicted on society by this man was probably far
greater than any evil wrought by a vulgar born criminal could have been,
his criminality is nevertheless of an attenuated type. The mischief he
wrought owed its gravity, not to the intensity of his criminal
tendencies, but to his remarkable talents, which increased his power for
evil as for good.

In this category of criminals must be inscribed those clever swindlers,
who set the whole world talking of their exploits: Madame Humbert,
Lemoine, and the cobbler-captain of Koepenick.

Sometimes, especially in political or commercial criminals, we find
cases of an auto-illusion, of which the author of the crime is as much
a victim as the public. Sometimes it is some device or mechanism which
an inventor is convinced he has invented or is about to invent, an
enterprise, in which the promoter imagines he will gain enormous wealth.
Sometimes it is a trick in which the cupidity of the victims and their
readiness to swallow promises of large and immediate profits play as
important a part as the ability of the swindler. Sometimes it is a
gigantic hoax, in which the deviser himself becomes keenly interested
and for the carrying out of which he spends as much talent and energy as
would suffice, if employed honestly, to acquire considerable wealth; but
the swindler delights in his ingenious fraud as though he were taking
part in some thrilling drama.

A typical instance is that of a certain C... who was imprisoned about
twenty years ago for defrauding a woman. My father undertook to cure him
while in prison and was able to follow him in his subsequent career.
This C... was a young man of good family, intelligent, honest, and a
good linguist. His countenance was pleasing and bore no trace of
precocious criminality. At the age of twenty he developed an
unrestrained love of gambling and in order to indulge this vice,
promised to marry a rich woman considerably older than himself, from
whom he borrowed large sums, on the understanding that they should be
paid back. However, shortly afterwards, he fell in love with a young
girl and married her. His ex-fiancee brought legal action against him
and he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. During this time he
shrank from seeing anybody and refused to