Suddenly, in 1881, began the great forced emigration of the Jews from Russia, and in the same year the main stream of the unfortunate wanderers commenced to flood the city of New York, and from there to spread over the breadth and the length of the United States. At present there are, probably, not less than three hundred thousand Russian Jews to be found in New York alone. The aspect of the Jewish colony was at once changed. It was thrown back into conditions resembling those in congested Russian cities. There came misery, poverty, and squalor. The struggle for existence was even harder than it had been at home. They had exchanged the tyranny of the autocracy for the liberty of the republic, but they did not at the same time better their material well-being. It was then that the sweat-shop with all its horrors had its beginning, or at least found its most objectionable development. And they were not all laborers who were forced to tread the sewing-machine, or roll cigars and fill cigarettes. Many of them had seen better days at home, some had even been students at gymnasia and at universities. Without any previous training in their particular occupations, forced to do ten and twelve hours' work of the hardest labor, they had no time to think of any but the most sordid, more immediate physical needs. Some indeed succeeded in establishing themselves permanently, but the majority groaned under a heavy yoke. Only by degrees did more and more of them issue from the sweat-shops, to take up other occupations; but few of them ever forgot the horrors of their first years in America. The whole course of the Judeo-German literature is a reflex, on the one side, of their sufferings, on the other, of the greater liberty, the slowly increasing well-being.