There is, however, another disturbing cause, which we must look at steadily, if we would understand its bearing on society, its influence on morals, and especially its connection with the subject of prison occupation and prison discipline. And especially ought we to present the subject in immediate connection with a consideration of the Magistracy. It is _Intoxication_ that crowds the police office and the alderman’s tribunal. Hourly is the magistrate called to commit or fine the violator of the law of temperance. The miserable wretches come into his presence without power to discriminate between right and wrong, with no command of their own movements, and no sense of propriety with regard to conduct or conversation; and complaints are sometimes made that these creatures are not treated with suitable consideration. Let us, when we consider the duties and conduct of magistrates, not overlook the disgusting materials to which they are to administer justice, nor blame them if they sometimes suffer the prisoner to hold the rank which he assigns to himself. ------------------ INTEMPERANCE. Of any two hundred persons committed to the County Prison, probably one hundred and fifty owe their incarceration to drunkenness. Assault and battery, breach of the peace, misdemeanor, vagrancy, abuse and threats, disorderly conduct, and other charges which figure upon the commitments sent by the magistrate with the prisoner, are often only other terms for drunkenness and only varieties in the _charge_ or slight additions to the offence; and even the higher offences against the law are frequently referable to, or connected with, intemperance in the use of intoxicating liquors; and it generally happens that when the prisoner is questioned with regard to the temptation to steal, to fight, or commit some other misdemeanor with which he stands charged, he replies that he knows nothing about such acts, he only took a drop too much, or was a “little tight;” he remembers a mass of things, yet nothing distinctly, and professes to feel greatly injured in being committed for a misdemeanor, when he had done nothing but get drunk; or that he should have been charged with assault and battery when he had only beaten his wife or struck the officer that arrested him; nor does he find it reconcilable with justice that he should be charged with abuse and threats for merely cursing the magistrate and offering to break his head at a moment of greater soberness. This vice of excessive drinking is then so intimately connected with the administration of justice, either as a motive or a stimulant for offences against the law, that it is deemed proper to consider it more closely in connection with prison discipline, in order that we may understand what are the duties of society in regard to its means and subjects, and thus we may also comprehend how entirely its