The activities of a subsidized immigration agency, the North Atlantic Trading Company, brought great numbers of these peoples. Foremost in numbers were the Ruthenians from Galicia. Most distinctive were the Doukhobors or Spirit Wrestlers of Southern Russia, about ten thousand of whom were brought to Canada at the instance of Tolstoy and some English Quakers to escape persecution for their refusal to undertake military service. The religious fanaticism of the Doukhobors, particularly when it took the form of midwinter pilgrimages in nature's garb, and the clannishness of the Ruthenians, who settled in solid blocks, gave rise to many problems of government and assimilation which taught Canadians the unwisdom of inviting immigration from eastern or southern Europe. Ruthenians and Poles, however, continued to come down to the eve of the Great War, and nearly all settled on western lands. Jewish Poland sent its thousands who settled in the larger cities, until Montreal had more Jews than Jerusalem and its Protestant schools held their Easter holidays in Passover. Italian navvies came also by the thousands, but mainly as birds of passage; and Greeks and men from the Balkan States were limited in numbers. Of the three million immigrants who came to Canada from the beginning of the century to the outbreak of the war, some eight hundred thousand came from continental Europe, and of these the Ruthenians, Jews, Italians, and Scandinavians were the most numerous. It was in the United States that Canada made the greatest efforts to obtain settlers and that she achieved the most striking success. Beginning in 1897 advertisements were placed in five or six thousand American farm and weekly newspapers. Booklets were distributed by the million. Hundreds of farmer delegates were given free trips through the promised land. Agents were appointed in each likely State, with sub-agents who were paid a bonus on every actual settler. The first settlers sent back word of limitless land to be had for a song, and of No. 1 Northern Wheat that ran thirty or forty bushels to the acre. Soon immigration from the States began; the trickle became a trek; the trek, a stampede. In 1896 the immigrants from the United States to Canada had been so few as not to be recorded; in 1897 there were 2000; in 1899, 12,000; in the fiscal year 1902-03, 50,000; and in 1912-13, 139,000. The new immigrants proved to be the best of settlers; nearly all were progressive farmers experienced in western methods and possessed of capital. The countermovement from Canada to the United States never wholly ceased, but it slackened and was much more than offset by this northward rush. Nothing so helped to confirm Canadian confidence in their own land and to make the outside world share this high estimate as this unimpeachable evidence from over a million American newcomers who found in Canada, between 1897 and 1914, greater opportunities than even the United States could offer.