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taverns or shops, where spirituous liquors are retailed in drams or in the form of grog. In eight or ten con-siderable streets, one fourth part of the whole num-ber of houses are taverns and groceries, or, in other words, dram-shops. The number of taverns is unlimitited by law. By the city charter, the power of granting licenses is vested in the mayor, who is the sole judge of the propriety of granting them, or of their number. Thirty shillings are paid for each license, four fifths of which sum goes into the city treasury, and the residue to the mayor. While a revenue is derived to the corporation from these licenses, it is not to be expected that there will be much solicitude to lessen their number, or to examine minutely into the merits of the applicants for them. Some regulations ought to be adopted for the reformation of the police in this respect. Grocers ought to be strictly prohibited from retailing liquors in drams. The number of taverns ought to be greatly diminished. Licenses should not be granted but to persons who are recommended by five known and respectable citizens, and under much larger penalties than at present, to enforce their obser-vance of the laws.* * In the town of Boston there are fifty taverns, or persons, licensed to retail liquors in small quantities. Three or four times that number, one would imagine, would be more than sufficient for this city. At present, the temptation to the indigent and labouring classes of the people to indulge in drink is so powerful, and the gratification so easy, at every turn of the street, that the greater number spend a large portion of their time and earn-ings in repeated indulgences of this depraved appe-tite, during the day, and return to their families in a state of partial or complete intoxication. The per-nicious consequences of such habits, to the individual and to society, are too striking to need any elaborate description, to enforce the propriety of adopting every suitable means of legislative and municipal regula-tion, for their prevention. A further source of vice and criminality is to be found in the horse-races which regularly take place