and interview individuals or groups of emigrants, with a view of learning their destination or of affirming my belief that they were laborers under contract, destined for the United States. Not only did these interrogations confirm my suspicions, but I have become convinced that the importation of contract labor to the United States has assumed alarming proportions of which the Department cannot form an adequate idea. I base this conviction not only upon my experience at the various places where emigrants concentrate, but upon observations made and collected in numerous villages which I reached by special conveyance, and in a large number of which I found that almost the entire male population, able to work, was absent, and upon close inquiry I learned that the men were all in the United States, having gone there under some contract of labor or other. This evil is largely contributed to by residents of the United States engaged in the steamship ticket and foreign exchange business, and not infrequently either connected with or publishing some newspaper in a foreign language. I took occasion to refer to this phase in one of my previous reports to the Department, containing information in point procured by me at the city of Laibach and from the Government at Vienna. I am convinced that Fares, at Marseille, also avails himself of many sources of this character in the pursuit of his nefarious business, as I was able to judge from the hundreds of letters I saw delivered to him, coming from the United States and bearing the heading of numerous steamship ticket agents and publishers of Syrian newspapers in this country. Another method which in my opinion is frequently resorted to to promote the importation of contract labor is as follows: A native of a certain village or town abroad, who had spent some time in the United States, will suddenly appear at said village, ostensibly on a visit, and within a short time thereafter he may be met on his return trip to the United States accompanied by groups of men whose number vary from ten to twenty-five, according to circumstances. I have observed such men purchasing a number of railroad tickets at Oderberg, on the Austro-Prussian border, for Bremen, and distribute them among the group of men that so accompanied him. I met the same man, who thus purchased the tickets at Oderberg, a few days later at Bremen, and upon my questioning him for the whereabouts of his friends I saw in his company at Oderberg he denied all knowledge of them; but I saw all of them in the immediate vicinity, and found that they had steamship tickets in their possession which were procured in the office of F. Missler. They were no longer in groups, and acted in a manner as though they had never seen the man who had led them, this being evidently part of their instructions and a matter of precaution. I could refer to hundreds of similar cases which I have encountered in my travels abroad. Most of these people so interrogated