Three months afterwards I again met him, but this time he stood in the dock, when a serious charge was made and proved against him. The last view I had of him was as he stepped into the prison-van, to be conveyed to the punishment he so richly merited. So passed from my knowledge the worst dipsomaniac it has been my lot to meet with. Like Lucifer from heaven, he fell to the lowest depth, and evil became his good; for it is always so: the greater the height from which a man falls, the lower the depths to which he descends. As in the physical world, so in the moral world, there is a law of gravitation. I have tried to understand these men, and I have failed to do so. I have taken some measure of the force that impels them, but neither I nor anyone else other than a dipsomaniac can realize in anything approaching its fulness the might and dreadfulness of the power that inhabits them.
The study of human nature is always interesting, but to study a criminal is an engrossing task. Anyone who undertakes this had better have no preconceived ideas; if he has he will have much to unlearn, for no two criminals are alike. Prison is probably the worst place in which to study a criminal. He is then under control; his actions are not ordered by himself, but by others, and he must obey. He, naturally, wants to make the best of his imprisonment; he, therefore, behaves himself, and his true nature or his fatal passion is not exhibited. When a dipsomaniac is detained where it is not possible for the passion of drink to be gratified, that passion lies dormant; it seems extinct, and the man flatters himself that it is dead; but when he is again at liberty, the lust for drink springs into active and powerful life.
It is just so with the criminal. In prison there is no possibility for him to indulge in his particular crime, therefore the lust for that crime is for the time being non-existent; but with liberty his lust again awakes, and the criminal finds, like the dipsomaniac, that not in protected retirement, but in full liberty, with every temptation around, and every possibility of falling, comes the time of danger; then the battle has to be fought and the victory won, if it is to be fought at all or ever won. At liberty I have seen such men; when at liberty I have made friends of them, the shelter of my own house has not been denied them, and I have had unique opportunities of studying them, and of trying to find out what it is that leads an industrious and skilled man again and again to the perpetration of crime.