Public Printer issues monthly a catalogue of books that have been finished during the month, giving the price of each. It is estimated that an edition of 10,000 copies of a 2,000-page book can be produced by the office in eight hours-type set, proof read, made up into pages, printed, folded, gathered, and covered. During the fiscal year ending June 30, 1895, the office used 4,547 tons of book, writing, plate, and ledger paper, and there were finished 1,787,473 volumes in cloth and leather bindings, and 1,182,955 pamphlets bound in paper, aside from the blank-book work used in all the department and public offices of the country. Visitors received at 10.00 A. M. and 2.00 P. M. The Department of Labor, controlled by a commissioner, collects and publishes useful information on subjects connected with labor, promoting the material, social, intellectual, and moral prosperity of men and women who live by their daily earnings. It publishes an annual report, largely statistical. The office is in the National Safe Deposit Building at New York Avenue and Fifteenth Street. The Civil Service Commission makes and supervises all regulations and examinations respecting applicants for employment in the Government service in those classes under the civil service law. It has offices in the Concordia Building, Eighth and E streets. The service classified under the act embraces about 54,000 places, including the executive departments at Washington; the Department of Labor; the Civil Service Commission; the Fish Commission; thirty-three customs districts, in each of which there are twenty or more employes; 609 free-delivery post offices and the Railway Mail Service; the Indian School Service; the Weather Bureau the Internal Revenue Service, and the Government Printing Office. The Inter-State Commerce Commission (Sun Building, No. 1317 F Street) examines into the management of the business of all common carriers subject to the act of February 4, 1887, and has power and jurisdiction generally over Inter-State traffic. The Inter-Continental Railway Commission has its office at No. 1429 New York Avenue. A Joint Commission of Congress to examine into the status of laws organizing the executive departments, and the Bureau of American Republics, whose purpose it is to promote trade, intelligence, and comity among all the American republics, have offices at No. 2 Jackson Place, at the southwest corner of Lafayette Square. VIII. FROM THE MONUMENT TO THE MUSEUMS. The Washington Monument. The dignity, symmetry, and towering height of Washington's character, as it now presents itself to the minds of his countrymen, are well exemplified in the majestic simplicity of his monument in Washington. This pure and glittering shaft, asking no aid from inscription or ornament, strikes up into heaven and leads the thought to a patriotism as spotless and a manhood as lofty as any American has attained to. It is the glory and grandeur of this superb monument that it typifies and recalls not Washington the man, but Washington the character. It is really a monument to the American people in the name of their foremost representative. It is in itself a constantly beautiful object, intensified, unconsciously to the beholder, perhaps, by the symbolism and sentiment it involves. With every varying mood of the changing air and sky, or time of day, it assumes some new phase of interest to the eye. Now it is clear and firm against the blue-hard, sharp-edged, cold, near at hand; anon it withdraws and softens and seems to tremble in a lambent envelope of azure ether, or to swim in a golden mist as its shadow, like that of a mighty dial, marks the approach of sunset upon the greensward that rolls eastward from its base. The most picturesque view of it, doubtless, is that from the east, where you may 66 compose" it in the distance of a picture, for which the trees and shrubbery, winding roads and Norman towers, of the Smithsonian park form the most artistic of foregrounds. This monument is the realization of a popular movement for a national memorial to Washington which began before his death, so |