The small income from the office of Alderman in this city is augmented by a salary allowed to six of them, who may happen to be of the right kind of politics to ensure their claims upon Councils to be elected Police Magistrates. The changes which the Charter of the City has undergone by amendments and substitution, have left Philadelphia in an anomalous situation with regard to offices. Every ward in the city has one or more Aldermen, who possess now little else than the functions of a justice of the peace. And the roll of officials bears also the name of a “Recorder,” yet that functionary has few if any other relations with the city government than has the humblest of the Aldermen; or if he has, it is some remnant of ancient obligation to do service never required, or to demand fees seldom paid to him. No one can deny that the present Recorder discharges well the duties of a justice of the peace, so far as his power extends; but no one will say that the office is essential to any branch of justice in the city if all others are well executed. We speak now rather in abstract, but it may not be out of the way to say, that the citizen who occupies at present the place of Recorder, seems to illustrate the idea of an efficient magistrate, as, without any particular call upon him, he has been a terror and a scourge to evil doers, and thus he magnifies his office, and makes it honorable. The report of our Prison Agent, extracts from which have been given, shows to what an extent the evil to which we allude has already extended. His labors procured the release of more than a hundred persons every month. Now, though in many instances the prisoner thus released may have violated some law, and thus have rendered himself obnoxious to the penalties of the statute, yet in a greater part of the committals, investigation shows that the idea of just convictions did not enter into the complaint, and that the magistrate might have caused a settlement of the matter, without recourse to incarceration, in the infliction of fine; or at least it would be easy so to amend the laws of the State as to empower the magistrate to deal thus with the accused. Much the largest part of the commitments, however, are of a kind that do not often come to the knowledge of the Agent, but are referred to the “Visiting Inspectors” of the Prison. These are for drunkenness, disorder, breach of the peace, and vagrancy; and as an Act of Assembly gives to the Inspectors of the Prison the power to discharge persons committed for such offences, it follows that many committed for thirty days are released before the expiration of their term. Intoxication is charged, and the miserable offender is sent to the prison; perhaps a family is dependent upon his or her labor, or an infant needs the nourishment, which only a mother can afford; and the miserable mother is suffering from an excess of that from which only an infant can ordinarily relieve her.