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
the moral atmosphere in which they were reared. From their present state
of mind,--whether they r