The value of this system was early recognized by the Slavic leaders. At first the societies were small and purely local but in time the individual groups tended to unite into central organizations which acquired larger and larger capital resources. These societies, whether directly connected with churches or not, gradually came to form a distinctive feature of Slavic-American life. Today there is no Slavic group which does not have one or more such organization of national significance. Among the leaders are the Czechoslovak National Alliance, the Polish National Alliance, the Ukrainian National Association, the Serb National Federation, the Polish Roman Catholic Union, the Ukrainian Workingmen’s Association, the Ukrainian Providence Association, the Croatian National Alliance. They possess large reserve funds and are leaders in financial, social, political and cultural work. Furthermore, as we shall see, it is out of these large, freely organized, fraternal organizations, with or without church support, that certain forms of Slavic scholarship have developed in the United States. This was inconsiderable in the beginning but it has grown and improved steadily and is destined to play a very important role in the future, especially in the case of those countries from which there has been an extensive immigration. Russian immigration has followed a quite different course. During the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire tried to channel all movement from home areas to Siberia instead of across the ocean. For this purpose, the government appropriated large sums of money and furnished transportation first from the Black Sea ports to the Pacific coast and then later along the Trans-Siberian railroad. As a result, prior to 1908, almost the entire Russian immigration into the United States was from the non-Russian areas in the northwest. This includes the Finns, the Lithuanians, the Poles and the Jews who began to leave Russia in large numbers in the nineties because of the anti-Semitic outbreaks.