An innocent woman has often been taken up in a grand swoop which a spasmodic effort of the police has made, and she is included in the long list of commitments as drunk, or a vagrant. Many of those who were guilty of the lower offences charged against them receive no good from their incarceration, and society is not benefited by their removal from the labor which maintains them and a family, and the imprisonment devolves upon the city the expenses of the support, often both of the offenders and their families. A considerable portion of the community that have acquaintance with the prison by commitment, are of a class that think all personal redress, and all protection from wrong, and all safety from the consequences of their own misconduct lie in an appeal to the magistrate, and a trifling quarrel in a neighborhood frequently leads to the arrest and incarceration of the principal members of several families, and the offending and the offended parties are often seen withdrawing from the contests of hands and clubs, and contending in a foot race to see which shall first enter complaint before a magistrate. Often in these matters both succeed; each contrives to get his antagonist into prison, and mulct him in costs. Occasionally it happens, that “the race is not to the swift;” success is found to depend on the possession of the means to pay the first cost of the action. Perhaps the most painful, because the most unrighteous, of this kind of suits, are those in which a quarrelsome drunkard, having beaten his wife, proceeds at once to the magistrate and charges her, on oath, with assault and battery, or with assault and threats, and the poor woman comes down to the prison with her head bruised, her eyes blackened, and her whole frame bearing marks of the outrageous injury inflicted by her cowardly, drunken husband, who, after a few days, finding his household matters in some derangement for want of a female head, obligingly releases his wife from prison, till his time for another debauch has arrived. Nor is it to be denied that the drunken wife often, very often, brings the husband into similar difficulties. In some of these cases a magistrate might, by interference, mitigate a portion of the misery which is inflicted, and by his friendly advice prevent much that usually follows. This constant resort to litigation in those who have no “cause” but what they create of themselves, is one of the crying evils of the times. The facility of a warrant, and the knowledge that the facility results from its price, cause a large portion of the cases which reach our courts of justice, or are settled, “with costs,” between the Alderman’s office and the jury-room.