The charitable institutions which were founded or enlarged in this period were not the only indication of the improved and settled condition of the Jews who came here in the preceding half century. These institutions were later to be even more enlarged, and numerous others were to be established to meet the demands made upon them in the following quarter century. It is to the synagogues or temples which date from these times that we have to turn in order to gain a true conception of the general condition of the Jews. In this respect there is a striking similarity between the condition of the Sephardim at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the German Jews at the end of its third quarter. In both cases the numerical growth almost stopped with the cessation of immigration from the home country. The small number of arrivals and the natural increase were barely enough to replace the losses through death and through estrangements which were caused by outright defections or by the slower process of mixed marriages. And just as the Spanish and Portuguese element in American Judaism, which had barely held its own after the suspension of the Inquisition, permitted the surviving Marranos to remain where they were, and improved conditions in Western Europe obviated the necessity of the Sephardim of Holland, France or England looking for new homes, so did the much larger and more active German element practically stop growing numerically after the emancipation of the Jews in the German States. The number of Jews who arrived here from Germany after 1880 is insignificant, and the same may be said of the relative number of German-Jewish synagogues which were established after that time. As a matter of fact the formation of German congregations stopped several years earlier. The better cohesiveness and discipline among the Americanized Jews made splits a very rare occurrence. Only in large cities the removal of many members of a congregation too far from the location of its synagogue caused the formation of new congregations, consisting mostly of members of older bodies, with some accessions of immigrants from the Slavic countries. In the smaller cities there is even now only one German-American congregation, usually dating from before the Civil War or from the decade following it. In the larger cities there may be several of them of about the same age, except in some communities, like Charleston. S. C., where the Spanish and the Germans are fused in the one Reform congregation, or in New York, where each section of the community is sufficiently large to have several congregations of its own.