All misdemeanours and crimes flow from three sources: ignorance, passion and innate, anti-social self-seeking. Ignorance is the main, almost the exclusive cause of wrongdoing among young criminals who have been badly brought up or neglected, who have never had anything but bad examples before them, and who cannot distinguish between good and evil. Society may hope to improve these by right treatment; it must not punish, it must educate them. Men who commit crimes from passion are those who possess a consciousness of Morality and a conscience, who know quite well what is right and what wrong, but have not sufficient strength of character, that is, not an adequately developed power of inhibition, to resist an opportunity, a temptation, a turmoil of their instincts. To want to improve them is senseless, for they are not bad; they are weak, or at any rate not strong enough. What they need is a strengthening of their character, of their faculty of inhibition, and to achieve this is beyond the power of society. All it can do is to humiliate the guilty party by publicly exposing his lapse and by condemning him, and then grant a delay of the execution of the sentence. In so doing it says to him: "You have acted basely and ought to be ashamed of yourself, now go and do not do it again." If the warning is unavailing and he relapses, then the earlier sentence, as well as the new one, is executed. Fear of this is added to his motives for acting honestly, and may possibly strengthen his resistance to the onslaught of his evil instincts. But his good conduct will always be at stake in the struggle between his power of inhibition and his instincts, and the stronger of the two will always carry the day. And finally, upon the man whose organic disposition makes him anti-social, upon Lombroso's born criminal, society can have no educative effect whatever. It is a hopeless case. Society can render him harmless, it cannot alter him. Consideration for his neighbour will never find a place in his consciousness. He will never learn to resist his impulses and desires. His spiritual insensibility makes him indifferent to the sufferings of others. Incapable of continuous and equable effort, he will always want to prey on society by begging, deceiving, stealing and robbing. He has no conscience and does not hear the voice of society in his mind. He knows nothing of good and evil, which are both empty phrases for him, words without any meaning, and he is convinced that he acts rightly every time he seeks to satisfy his appetites. In his case it is love's labour lost to try and give a moral meaning to the sanctions of the law. Punishment is not directed against the soul of the born criminal, only against his body. It overwhelms him, fetters him and makes him either for the time being, or permanently, harmless; but his organic tendency continues to sway him, and whenever he recovers his liberty he is the same as before he was punished.