Page:Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the state of New York.djvu/76

62 up the river. It is their official report, with its accompanying documents, containing the examinations of the different parties and witnesses, which forms the basis of the following statements:

"Your Committee must confess," the report says, "that they had no conception of, nor would they have believed, the extent to which these frauds and outrages have been practised, until they came to investigate them. As soon as a ship, loaded with these emigrants, reaches our shores, it is boarded by a class of men called runners, either in the employment of boarding-house keepers or forwarding establishments, soliciting custom for their employers. In order the more successfully to enable the latter to gain the confidence of the emigrant, they usually employ those who can speak the same language with the emigrant. If they cannot succeed in any other way in getting possession and control over the object of their prey, they proceed to take charge of their luggage, and take it to some boarding-house for safe-keeping, generally under the assurance that they will charge nothing for carriage-hire or storage. In this way they are induced to go to some emigrant boarding-house, of which there are a great many in the city, and then too often under a pretence that they will charge but a small sum for meals or board. The keepers of these houses induce these people to stay a few days, and, when they come to leave, usually charge them three or four times as much as they agreed or expected to pay, and exorbitant prices for storing their luggage; and, in case of their inability to pay, their luggage is detained as security. Some of these runners are employed by the month, and some work upon commission. Where they are in the employment of the forwarding establishments or passenger offices, and receive a commission for each passenger they bring in, they are, in many cases, allowed by their employers to charge all they can get over a certain sum for transporting the passenger to a particular place. This, it will be seen, stimulates the runners to great exertions, not only to get as many passengers as possible, but to get them at the highest possible prices. To enable them to carry out their designs, all sorts of falsehoods are resorted to to mislead and deceive the emigrant as to the prices of fare and mode of conveyance.