Although up to this time it is impossible to speak of a Hellenizing of the great interior cities of western Asia Minor, since these are (thus being quite different from the coast cities) very far from succumbing, either numerically or culturally, to the Greek invasion—the number of Greeks is the largest in Manissa—yet, if one looks into the matter narrowly, he gains the impression that in the interior the Hellenizing influence comes from the smaller towns. This supposition, to be sure, is opposed to the view, still broadly accepted, that the Greek element is purely a city element, and that the country-folk consist only of Turks. This view, which, as we have seen, does not hold even in the coast regions, is, however, absolutely false and is only to be explained as arising from the impressions of superficial travelers who have rarely penetrated into the remoter regions with a predominantly rural population. Anyone who has, for example, visited the larger Greek islands of the Asiatic coast, like Mitylene, Chios, Samos and Rhodes, knows that these dense populations live in great measure from grape and fruit-raising or from silk culture, and only in a very small degree from trade. Farming plays no very large part, simply because of the lack of arable land. Since now, as we have said, these very islands for something like fifty years have become very densely populated or even in part overpopulated (as, for instance, Samos), there have been periodical emigrations of the island peasants, in considerable numbers, over to the mainland, where they have, in particular, settled in the fruitful valleys of the Mæander and the Hermos in the western parts of Asia Minor and in that of the Sangarios, farther north. In part, it is the descendants of the former Greek landowners who have been reduced to socagers or serfs, who, on getting possession of some little capital, have now, in their turn, driven back the Turks by buying them out or by working the soil more scientifically, a process in which they were helped by the immigrant islanders. If a sufficient number of them is thus found settled together, they try to obtain the Sultan’s firman permitting them to settle in a town. Thus the English traveler Hamilton states that the Greeks in a little town of Lydia (Singerli), in which they had settled ten years before, had, in his time (1837), increased to 40-50 families and were busied with building a new market. In this way numerous new and dense settlements came into existence in the midst of the more scattered Turkish populations, and the higher fecundity of the Greek settlers, combined with their industry, their intellectual keenness, their frugality and their community-feeling, helped always by the retrogression of the Turkish population itself, have contributed to extend the Hellenizing process more and more to the country districts.[31]