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Rh annual reports of executive officers, consisted in the purchase of statistical publications by private parties. Among these were Timothy Pitkins' Commercial Statistics of the United States, 1816. Two hundred and fifty copies of this valuable work were purchased in 1818 and distributed. In the same year Congress purchased Dr. Adam Seybert's Statistical Annals, being views of the population, commerce, navigation, fisheries, public lands, post office establishment, revenues, mint, military and naval establishments, expenditures, public debt, and sinking fund of the United States, founded on official documents, commencing on the 4th of March 1789, and ended on the 20th of April 1818. Another valuable work purchased by Congress was that of George Watterson and Nicholas Biddle Van Zandt, being statistical tables, Part I. (1829) and Part II. (1833).

Among the important documents published by Congress may be mentioned the report, December 20, 1819, of the Senate Committee on Commerce and Manufactures on statistics of foreign commerce. The result of this report was the passage of the act of February 10, 1820, providing for the taking of statistics of foreign commerce. In 1879 the Hewitt committee of the House made a report on the causes of the general depression in labor and business. Among the Senate miscellaneous documents for the Forty-sixth Congress will be found a report on the depression in labor and business and Chinese immigration. The Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Forty-eighth Congress, made a report upon the relations of labor and capital. This report is in four volumes, and is known as the Blair report. January 18, 1886, the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce made a valuable report on interstate commerce. In 1886 the House made a report giving a complete chronological history of revenue and general appropriation bills from the First to the Forty-ninth Congress. March 3, 1887, a select committee of the House made a report on existing labor troubles in the Southwest, while at the Fiftieth Congress, second session, a select committee made a report on labor troubles in Pennsylvania. A valuable report on immigration and naturalization was