In time all this has its effect. A small group of the original emigrant’s former neighbors resolve to try their luck too. The most natural thing, of course, is for them to go to the place where their friend is. He helps them to find work, tides them over difficulties, and in various ways makes their life easier and simpler than his had been. Each of these newcomers also writes letters home, which go through the same round, and add to the growing knowledge of America, and the discontent with European life in comparison. Once started, the movement grows with great rapidity, and the letters from America increase in geometrical proportion. Other nuclei start up in other places, recruits are drawn from more distant villages, and the first little trickling stream becomes a swelling tide. This is what has come to be known as the chain-letter system. Multiplied by hundreds of thousands, the foregoing example serves to illustrate the irresistible network of communications which is drawing the peasants of Europe to every part of the United States. This is recognized by all authorities as probably the most powerful single factor in stirring up emigration from such countries as Italy, Austria-Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, etc. Its effect has been graphically described by a Greek writer in the following words: “‘Such a one, from such a village, sent home so many dollars within a year,’ is heard in some village or city, and this news, passed like lightning from village to village and from city to city, and magnified from mouth to mouth, causes the farmer to forsake his plow, the shepherd to sell his sheep, the mechanic to throw away his tools, the small-grocer to break up his store, the teacher to forsake his rostrum, and all to hasten to provide passage money, so that they may embark, if possible, on the first ship for America, and gather up the dollars in the streets before they are all gone.”[127] This is a perfectly natural influence, and obviously beyond the power of any legislation to check, even if that were desirable. When inspired merely by a friendly interest in the home neighbors, a desire to keep in touch with them, and a little personal vanity, it is probably the most harmless of any of the forms of stimulation. When, as all too frequently happens, the underlying motive is sinister and selfish, it becomes a source of the greatest deceit and injustice.