was not as dangerous to society as the
prosecutor would have them believe.

The justiciary was the personification of impartiality and justice,
and endeavored to impress on the jury that which they already knew and
could not help knowing. Again they took recesses and smoked
cigarettes, and again the usher shouted "Hear ye!" and the two
gendarmes sat trying to keep awake.

It developed during the trial that this boy had been apprenticed in a
tobacco factory, in which he worked five years. This year he was
discharged by his employer after a misunderstanding with the
employees, and, going idly about the city, he spent all he had on
drink. At an inn he met a locksmith who had also been discharged and
was drinking hard, and the two went at night, while drunk, to that
shed, broke the lock, and took the first thing they saw. They were
caught, and as they confessed they were imprisoned. The locksmith,
while waiting for a trial, died. The boy was now being tried as a
dangerous creature from whom it was necessary to protect society.

"As dangerous a creature as the prisoner of yesterday," Nekhludoff
thought while watching the proceedings. "They are dangerous, but are
we not dangerous? I am a libertine, an impostor; and all of us, all
those that know me as I am, not only do not detest but respect me."

It is evident that this boy is no villain, but a very ordinary
person--every one sees that--and that he became what he is only
because he lived amid conditions that beget such people. It is
therefore plain that such boys will exist as long as the conditions
producing these unfortunates remain unchanged. If any one had taken
pity on this boy, Nekhludoff thought while looking at the sickly,
frightened face of the boy, before want had driven him from the
village to the city, and relieved that want, or, when, after twelve
hours' work in the factory, he was visiting inns with grown-up
comrades, some one had told him, "Don't go, Vania; it is bad," the boy
would not have gone, or got drunk, and the burglary would never have
occurred.

But no one pitied the boy during the time that he, like an animal,
spent his school years in the city, and, with close-cropped hair, to
prevent his getting vermin, ran errands for the workmen. On the
contrary, the only thing he had heard from the workmen and his
comrades was to the effect that a brave fellow was he who cheated,
drank, reviled, fought, or led a depraved life.

And when, sickly and depr