We went over the whole of the ruins, and were kindly permitted to see the hall, staircase, and drawingroom of the inhabited part, though it was not the regular day for showing the place. The hall is lofty, venerable, and in appropriate keeping; and the drawingroom has a row of columns down the middle, supporting Gothic arches forming a groined ceiling resembling that of a low crypt under a church. We went over all those parts of the ruins which are seen by strangers, and were gratified to find the walls of the refectory displayed in such a manner as to show what the apartment had been; though the effect was necessarily much injured by the floor having been recently covered with flat tiles laid in cement, to prevent the rain from penetrating the arches to the ancient kitchen below. Underneath a bowling-green are a number of gloomy damp vaults, which we passed through, one after another, and were told that they were prisons: one of them has lately been repaired, and we hope the whole will be preserved as a historical monument, till the time arrives when offenders, instead of being sent to such places, to the treadmill, to solitary confinement, the penitentiary, the hulks, or being transported, will be sent to training establishments, where they will be reformed by kind treatment, administered by men and women trained on purpose. We are quite aware that this will be thought a visionary idea: but it will not be the only one of our visionary ideas that have been at first sneered at, and yet afterwards realised, even in our time; for example, teaching music to the masses. We request that it may be borne in mind that the most vicious and abandoned convicts, even in Norfolk Island, the ultima Thule of crime and misery, have been reformed. In the manner to which we allude, by Capt. M'Konochie. There is also in Munich an establishment (the Ruhensfeste), founded by Count Rumford, for effecting the same object. The time will come when the state will not only have normal schools for training schoolmasters for the youth of the national schools, but colleges for training humanisers for the inmates of prisons; men who shall adopt as a profession what Capt. M'Konochie has adopted from philanthropy. If mankind had taken a tithe of the trouble to reclaim and humanise offenders against law and justice that they have taken to tame wild animals for amusement how different, at the present time, would have been the statistics of crime in all countries ! but it would appear that good is only to be attained as the result of a long experience of evil.
