The tide of immigration, which began to rise still higher than before in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, now consisted to a considerable part of Germans, and a goodly portion of them were Jews from Germany and the surrounding countries. The official figures for the number of immigrants who came to the United States in 1826 are 10,837; for 1832, 60,482; in 1842 it rose to 104,565. The rise was very unequal, with marked recessions sometimes to less than half in the intervening years; but when measured by decades the increase was constant, and after 1845 there were only two years――1861 and 1862――in which the number of immigrants fell below 100,000. While there are no figures obtainable as to the number of Jews which came in those years, it is certain that they soon outnumbered many times the few comparatively small communities which existed before that period. The estimates made by representative Jews at various times, giving the number of Jews in the country in 1818 as 3,000, in 1826 as 6,000, in 1840 as 15,000 and in 1848 as 50,000, are merely guesses, but they give a fair idea of the estimated ratio of increase in those thirty years. The experience of to-day is that whenever actual figures are obtained they prove to be in excess of the estimate made by communal leaders, and it is probable that the same results would be disclosed in the former times, too. On the other hand, care must be exercised to guard against exaggerated estimates, made for various reasons, but mainly for political effect. As a large part of the Jewish immigrants then took to peddling or other forms of trade on a small scale, it was natural for them to disperse over all the states and territories, though, as we shall see farther on, many settled in the larger cities, in which the number of Jews soon rapidly multiplied. The problem of congestion never arose, or could arise, among business people, no matter how small their business might be at the beginning. It arose at a later period of immigration, which brought to our shores large numbers of laborers, both skilled and unskilled, with whom living near their centers of occupation was an economic necessity as well as a convenience. This is why no artificial aid or encouragement was at that time necessary to the scattering of Jewish immigrants over all habitable places, and why many of them became pioneers and early settlers in new communities. The same thing happens now, too, with that small part of the immigrants which still take to trading as their first vocation.