suppression becomes a means of ameliorating the condition of public prisons. If we would lesson the evils of prisons, perhaps the most important step would be to diminish the number of prisoners. To strike from the list of offences that offence which is the parent, the assistant, and the offspring of so many more—would seem to be a great advance in the work of those who seek to denounce vice as well as to correct the vicious and criminal. How drunkenness is to be diminished in our community, is a problem difficult of solution. Attempts have been made of various kinds, with various degrees of temporary success; but the appetites of one class and the cupidity of another, seem to baffle the efforts of the benevolent and counteract the enactments of legislatures. It may however tend towards an amendment, that something of the extent of the evil should be made public. The means of intemperance are indeed public and its fruits abound, but very few stop to notice the extent of any habit that grows up gradually in a community and is consistent with general customs and taste, and only to be condemned for its excess, or only to be entirely condemned when its excess shows that the evils of abuse outweigh all advantages of moderate indulgence. Not many who read this report have thought to note the multiplied number of shops, saloons, taverns, hotels, casinos and cellars, whose maintenance is the profit on the sale of intoxicating liquors; yet these places present themselves all around us, and in certain parts of the city they are in such abundance as would lead one, a stranger to our domestic life, to suppose that the chief employment of the people was vending liquors, and the principle food was whiskey. Fifty grog shops and liquor stores are found for one bakery, so that Falstaff’s “penny for bread and a shilling for sack,” seems no longer an extravagant partiality for liquids over solids; and, if it should be said that many families bake their loaves instead of depending on the bakers for their daily bread, it may with equal truth be replied that thousands of those who reach Moyamensing Prison for drunkenness, maintain a household altar to intemperance, at which their neighbors also sacrifice (themselves and their character) in devotion to the social jug, from which drunkenness can be imbibed without the expense of a license or the payments of profits to the retailer.