With the establishment of these new lines of communication, it followed inevitably that the transportation companies should put forth every effort to attract as much business as possible to them. So we find the activities of transportation and emigration agents extending farther and farther into Europe, with the growth of lines that demanded their services. The importance of these agents in stimulating emigration will be discussed in another connection. Along with these changes, and incident to the beginnings of emigration from some of these new sources, there grew up in these countries a better knowledge of the United States, its attractions, and the means of getting there. This knowledge was very meager and faulty at first, and willfully distorted by the agents, but it served to awaken the people to the possibilities of emigration, and to stimulate them to take the step. This influence was abetted by a growing sense of independence and ambition on the part of the people of these regions, which made it more possible for them to act on their own initiative. They could never have emigrated under the conditions of difficulty, uncertainty, and hardship which marked the earlier movement, and which the more hardy, adventurous, and daring northern races faced without hesitation. There are two further causes of this shifting of the sources of immigration from northern to southern Europe, which are even more significant than the foregoing. The first of these is that, with the filling up of the United States, and the industrial improvements of northern Europe, the economic situation in this country no longer presents the same marked advantages over the older nations that it did during most of the nineteenth century. The immigrant from England, Ireland, Germany, or Sweden no longer finds his lot so much easier here than at home. The United States has now its own problems of congestion, pauperism, and competition of labor. Consequently it is much less worth while for the northern immigrant to come. But as compared with the more backward countries of Europe, there is still a sufficient margin of advantage in the United States to make it well worth while for the peasant to make the change. The comparison of the conditions which exist, or which he believes to exist, in the United States, with those in his own land has still sufficient power to arouse those feelings of discontent which are necessary to migration.