Reviewing the third period, we see that it was a period of rapidly increasing immigration, responding to the expanding industry and exceptionally favorable agricultural situation in this country. The movement culminated in the enormous immigration of the late forties and early fifties. These were mainly Germans, who left their home primarily for political reasons, and took up farm lands in the west, and Irish, who emigrated because of economic disaster, and tended to linger in the eastern cities, or to go out into the construction camps. Both of these races were closely allied to the American people, and easily assimilated. At the beginning of the period, the attitude of the American people was almost wholly one of welcome, but with the increase of the current, bringing as it did enormous numbers of destitute and helpless aliens, there arose a distinct feeling of opposition to unregulated immigration, based primarily upon the dislike of foreign paupers and criminals, and aided by the undeniable practice of foreign countries of emptying their poorhouses, and even their jails, upon our shores. This feeling later came to be intensified by a strong antipathy to Roman Catholics and the restriction of immigration was made a party policy. Nevertheless, the opposition to immigration did not, during this period, attain sufficient strength to secure any important legislation. Many of the states had laws designed to indemnify the communities against expense on account of foreign paupers, which may have had a slight restrictive effect. But such federal legislation as there was, was directed to the improvement of the conditions of the voyage, and hence had an encouraging rather than a restrictive tendency. With the approach of the Civil War immigration fell off, and public attention was diverted to other matters. CHAPTER V 1860 TO 1882 The disturbances connected with the Civil War, following the industrial depression of 1857, naturally produced a diminution in the immigration current, which in the year 1862 fell to 72,183, the lowest point it had reached for more than twenty years, and one which has never been reached since. This condition, which tended to allay the excessive fear of immigration which had marked the previous decade, was augmented by certain other factors. Foremost among these was the enormous internal migration of people from the east to the middle and farther west, encouraged by the liberal homestead act of 1862. This movement, in connection with the loss of life occasioned by the war, seemed to leave great gaps in the population of the eastern states, and put the foreigners who came to fill them in much better favor. Many of the immigrants themselves also moved on to the west and took up new land, where they crowded nobody and rendered a real service in the building up of the country.