The traveller will not be permitted to see the state prisoners of any despotic government; but wherever the subject of prison reform has been entertained, (and Howard's spirit is at work in many countries of the world,) there will probably be opportunity to converse with offenders in a better way than by singling them out from the crowd, in a spirit of condescension, and asking them a few questions, in the answers to which you can place no confidence. If you can converse face to face with a convict, as man with man, you can hardly fail to be instructed. If he has been long deprived of equal conversation, his heart will be full; his disposition will be to trust you; his impulse will be to confide to you his offence, and all the details connected with it. By thus conversing with a variety of offenders, you will be put in possession of the causes of crime, of the views of society upon the relative gravity of offences, and of the condition of hope or despair in which those are left who have broken the laws, and are delivered over to shame. Much light will also be thrown upon the seat of the disorders of society. Putting political offences aside, as varying in number in proportion to the nature of the government, almost all the rest are offences against property. Nine out of ten convicts, perhaps, are punished for taking the money or money's worth of another. Here is a hint as to the respects in which society is most mistaken in its principles, and weakest in its organization. Of the offences against the person, some are occasioned by the bad habits which attend the practice of depredation on property; thieves are drunkards, and drunkards are brawlers:--but the greater number arise out of domestic miseries. Where there are fewest assaults occasioned by conjugal injuries and domestic troubles, the state of morals is the purest. Where they abound, it is clear that the course of love does not run smooth; and that, from the workings of some bad principles, domestic morals are in a low state. In Austria and Prussia, state criminals abound; while in America such a thing is rarely heard of. In America, a youthful and thriving country, offences against property for the most part arise out of bad personal habits, which again are occasioned by domestic misery of some kind; this domestic misery, however, being itself less common than in an older state of society. In England almost all the offences are against property, and are so multitudinous as to warrant a stranger's conclusion that the distribution of property among us must be extremely faulty, the oppression of certain classes by others very severe, and our political morals very low; in short, that the aristocratic spirit rules in England. From the tales of convicts,--how they were reared, what was the nature of the snares into which they fell, what opportunity of retrieving themselves remained, and what was the character of the influences which sank them into misery,--much cannot but be learned of