"In Dyke vs. Erie Railway, 45 N. Y., 113, 117, a passenger traveling upon a ticket by which a railroad corporation, established in New York, and whose road extended from one place to another in that State, passing through the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey by their permission, agreed to carry him from one to another place in New York, was injured in Pennsylvania, by the law of which the damages in actions against railroads for personal injury were limited to $3,000. The Court of Appeals of New York held that the law of Pennsylvania had no application to the case; and Mr. Justice Allen, delivering the opinion, referred to the case of Peninsular & Oriental Co. vs. Shand, before cited, as analogous in principle, and said: The contract was single and the performance one continuous act. The defendant did not undertake for one specific act, in part performance, in one State, and another specific and distinct act in another of the states named, as to which the parties could be presumed to have had in view the laws and usages of distinct places. Whatever was done in Pennsylvania was a part of the single act of transportation from Attica or Waverly, in the State of New York, to the city of New York, and in performance of an obligation assumed and undertaken in this State, and which was indivisible. The obligation was created here, and by force of the laws of this State, and force and effect must be given to it in conformity to the laws of New York. The performance was to commence in New York, and to be fully completed in the same State, but liable to breach, partial or entire, in the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, through which the road of the defendant passed; but whether the contract was broken, and if broken the consequences of the breach, should be determined by the laws of this State. It cannot be assumed that the parties intended to subject the contract to the laws of the other states, or that their rights and liabilities should be qualified or varied by any diversities that might exist between the laws of those states and the lex loci contractus."

"In McDaniel vs. Chicago & Northwestern Railway, 24 Iowa, 412, 417, cattle transported by a railroad company from a place in Iowa to a place in Illinois, under a special contract made in Iowa, containing a stipulation that the company should be exempt from liability for any damage, unless resulting from collision or derailing of trains, were injured in Illinois by the negligence of the company's servants; and the Supreme Court of Iowa, Chief Justice Dillon presiding, held the case to be governed by the law of Iowa, which permitted no common carrier to exempt himself from the liability which would exist in the absence of the contract. The court said: The contract being entire and indivisible, made in Iowa, and to be partly performed here, it must, as to its validity, nature, obligation and interpretation, be governed by our law. And by our law, so far as it seeks to change the common law, it is wholly nugatory and inoperative. The rights of the parties, then, are to be determined under the common law, the same as if no such contract had been made.'

"So in Pennsylvania Co. vs. Fairchild, 69 Illinois, 260, where a railroad company received in Indiana goods consigned to Leavenworth, in Kansas, and carried them to Chicago in Illinois, and there delivered them to another railroad company, in whose custody they were destroyed by fire, the Supreme Court of Illinois held that the case must be governed by the law of Indiana, by which the first company was not liable for the loss of the goods after they passed into the custody of the next carrier in the line of transit. "The other cases in the courts of the several states, cited at the bar, afford no certain or satisfactory guide. Two cases, held not to be governed by a statute of Pennsylvania providing that no railroad corporation should be liable for a loss of passenger's baggage beyond $300, unless the excess in value was disclosed and paid for, were decided (whether rightly or not we need not consider) without much reference to authority, and upon their peculiar circumstances - the one case, on the ground that a contract by a New Jersey corporation to carry a passenger and his baggage from a wharf in Philadelphia across the Delaware River, in which the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey had equal rights of navigation and passage, and thence through the State of New Jersey to Atlantic City, was a contract to be performed in New Jersey and governed by the law of that state; Brown vs. Camden & Atlantic Railroad, 83 Penn. St., 316; and the other case, on the ground that the baggage, received at a town in Pennsylvania to be carried to New York City, having been lost after its arrival by negligence on the part of the railroad company, the contract, so far as concerned the delivery, was to be governed by the law of New York. Curtis vs. Delaware & Lackawanna Railroad, 74 N. Y., 116. The suggestion in Barter vs. Wheeler, 49 N. H., 9, 29, that the question, whether the liability of a railroad corporation for goods transported through parts of two states was that of a common carrier or of a forwarder only, should be governed by the law of the state in which the loss happened, was not necessary to the decision, and appears to be based on a strained inference from the observations of Mr. Justice Story in Pope vs. Nickerson, above cited. In the later case, the Supreme Court of New Hampshire reserved any expression of opinion upon a like question. Gray vs. Jackson, 51 N. H., 9, 39.

"This review of the principal cases demonstrates that according to the great preponderance, if not the uniform concurrence, of authority, the general rule, that the nature, the obligation and the interpretation of a contract are to be governed by the law of the place where it is made, unless the parties at the time of making it have some other law in view, requires a contract of affreightment, made in one country between citizens or residents thereof, and the performance of which begins there, to be governed by the law of that country, unless the parties, when entering into the contract, clearly manifest a mutual intention that it shall be governed by the law of some other country.