advantage of the simplicity of the emigrant, their prompt expulsion would be the certain result. Here then, in a most essential matter, is complete protection afforded to the inexperienced and the helpless. The sale of railway tickets, the fruitful source of rob bery and actual ruin in former days, is entrusted to re sponsible railway agents, over whom the Commissioners, as in duty bound, maintain a watchful control, necessary rather to prevent delay and inconvenience to the emigrant than to protect him against positive fraud. It is the in terest of the railway companies represented in this bureau to fulfil their engagements with honesty and liberality ; as if they fail to do so, the Commissioners have sufficient power to bring them to their senses.* Of bogus tickets there need be no apprehension now, as in former times, when they were sold at home in the seaport town, and even in the country village ; on board-ship during the voyage, or on the wharves and in the streets of New York. The mere loss of the purchase-money did not by any means represent the infamy of the fraud or the magnitude of the evil. Not only was the individual or the family effectually plundered, but, being deprived of the means of transport, they could not get beyond the precincts of the city in which they first set foot, and thus all hopes of a future of profit able industry were lost to them for ever. The sale of rail road tickets in Castle Garden is therefore a protection of the very first importance to the emigrant.
- The Commissioners, in a memorial addressed to the Senate of the United
States, in reference to a bill before Congress, dated June 6, 1866, refer to causes of complaint brought before them through one of their officers. They say that, al though they have recently discovered some irregularities in connection with railroad fares, of which they have reason to complain, they are assured and believe that all causes of complaint had been promptly removed. The Commissioners are right to compel those who avail themselves of the privilege of sale under their roof to act in the most loyal fairness to their clients; but, be the irregularities what they may, they are but trifling indeed when contrasted with the abominable frauds the flagitious robberies at both sides of the Atlantic practised only a few years since, and practised with almost entire impunity.
