garnishments in certain cases, and there is much railroad and commercial law which it behooves the officials interested to be well posted in. When the goods arrive at destination the possession of the bill of lading is the evidence of the consignee's right to receive them. Now we will return to the shipment itself and see how it is taken care of. The whole structure of the system of collecting freight revenue, holding accountable all agents who assess it and collect it, dividing it in the agreed proportions between all the railroads, boats, bridges, wharves, and transfer companies who may handle it in its journeys, even across the continent, and the tabulating of the immense mass of statistics which are kept to show, separately, the quantities of freight of every possible class and variety, by every possible route, and to and from every possible point of destination and departure--all this system, neither the magnitude nor the minute elaboration of which can be adequately described within limits, is founded upon a paper called the way-bill. The theory of the way-bill is that no car must move without one accompanying it, describing it by its number and the initials of the road owning it, and showing its points of departure and destination, its entire contents, with marks and weights of each package, consignors and consignees, freight and charges prepaid or to be collected at destination, and the proportion of the same due to each carrier or transfer in the line. And not only must a way-bill accompany the car, but a duplicate of it must be sent immediately and directly, by the office making the original, to the office of the auditor of freight receipts. If the railroad is a member of any association, as the Trunk Line Association in New York, another duplicate is sent to its office, that it may supervise all rates, and see what each road is doing. The sum of all the way-bills is the total of a road's freight business. To facilitate taking copies they are printed with an ink which will give several impressions on strong, thin tissue-paper, forming "soft copies," while the "hard copy," or original, goes with the freight to be checked against it when the car is unloaded.