isons, as appears in the reports of the Board of Charities
and Correction, runs thus:--

Of female vagrants, there were in

1857..........3,449
1859..........5,778
1860..........5,880
1861..........3,172
1862..........2,243
1863..........1,756
1864..........1,342
1869............785
1870............671
1871............548.

We have omitted some of the years on account of want of space; they do
not, however, change the steady rate of decrease in this offense.

Thus, in eleven years, the imprisonments of female vagrants have fallen
off from 5,880 to 548. This, surely, is a good show; and yet in that
period our population increased about thirteen and a half per cent, so
that, according to the usual law, the commitments should have been this
year over 4,700. [The population of New York increased from 814,224, in
1860, to 915,520, in 1870, or only about twelve and a half per cent. The
increase in the previous decade was about fifty per cent. There can be
no doubt that the falling-off is entirely in the middle classes, who
have removed to the neighboring rural districts. The classes from which
most of the criminals come have undoubtedly increased, as before, at
least fifty per cent.

I have retained for ten years, however, the ratio of the census, twelve
and a half per cent.]

If we turn now to the reports of the Commissioners of Police, the
returns are almost equally encouraging, though the classification of
arrests does not exactly correspond with that of imprisonments; that is,
a person may be arrested for vagrancy, and sentenced for some other
offense, and _vice versa._

The reports of arrests of female vagrants ran thus:--

1861....................2,161
1862....................2,008
1863....................1,728
1867....................1,591
1869....................1,078
1870......................701
1871......................914

We have not, unfortunately, statistics of arrests farther back than
1861.

Another crime of young girls is thieving or petty larceny. The rate of
commitments runs thus for females:--

1859......................944
1860......................890
1861......................880
1863....................1,133
1864....................1,131
1865......................877
1869......................989
1870......................746
1871......................572

The increase of this crime daring the war, in the years 1863 and 1864,
is very marked; but in twelve years it has fa