r of a foreign department can
tell almost offhand whether he wants a bill of any given name or not.

Where documents accompany the draft and the merchandise is formally
hypothecated to the buyer of the draft, it might not be thought that
the standing of the drawer would be of such great importance.
Possession of the merchandise, it is true, gives the banker a certain
form of security in case acceptance of the bill is refused by the
parties on whom it is drawn or in case they refuse to pay it when it
comes due, but the disposal of such collateral is a burdensome and
often expensive operation. The banker in New York who buys a sixty-day
draft drawn against a shipment of butter is presumably not an expert on
the butter market and if he should be forced to sell the butter, might
not be able to do so to the fullest possible advantage. Employment of
an expert agent is an expensive operation, and, moreover, there is
always the danger of legal complication arising out of the banker's
having sold the collateral. It is desirable in every way that if there
is to be any trouble about the acceptance or payment of a draft, the
banker should keep himself out of it.

A concrete illustration of the dangers attendant upon the purchase of
commercial long bills from irresponsible parties is to be found in what
happened a few years ago to a prominent exchange house in New York.
This house had been buying the bills of a certain firm for some little
time, and everything had gone well. But one day acceptance of a bill
for L2,000 was refused by the party abroad, and the news cabled that
the bill of lading was a forgery and that no such shipment had ever
been made. Wiring hurriedly to the inland city in which was located the
firm which drew the bill, the New York bank received the reply that
both partners had decamped. What had happened was that, about to break
up, the "firm" had drawn and sold several large bills of exchange, with
forged documents attached, received their money for them, and then
disappeared. Neither of them was ever apprehended, and the various
bankers who had taken the exchange lost the money they had paid for it.
Forgery of the bill of lading in this case had been a comparatively
easy matter, the shipment purporting to have been made from an obscure
little cotton town in the South, the signature of whose railroad agent
was not at all known.

This forgery is only one example of the trickery possible and the
extreme care wh