They were not “certain half-human beings” Settembrini corrected him. They were men, like the Engineer, like himself, Settembrini⁠—only weak-willed victims of a defective social system. He cited the case of an abandoned criminal, the kind always referred to by the prosecuting attorneys as a “beast in human form,” who had covered the walls of his cell with verse, and not at all bad verse either, much better than most prosecuting attorneys ever managed to write.

That cast a somewhat singular light on the art of verse-writing, Naphta retorted, but was not otherwise worth answering.

Hans Castorp said he was not surprised to hear that Naphta favoured the death penalty. To his mind, Naphta was as revolutionary as Settembrini, only in a conservative direction⁠—a reactionary revolutionist.