More and more immigration is an economic matter, a flow of men rather than of families, seeking gain rather than religious and political liberty. Those who bring anything but their hands are a very small and diminishing contingent. Most of the money the immigrant shows on landing has been supplied him for that purpose. In 1882, when the old immigration reached its height, the public domain was being carved up at a tremendous rate, and the home-seeker predominated. When the crest of the new immigration arrived, in 1907, a quarter of a century later, free land was gone forever, and the job-seeker predominated. Formerly the idea of wandering oversea sprang up naturally among the intelligent and restless; now the idea is sown broadcast by thousands of steamship agents and their runners. In the tavern, knee to knee with the yokels, sits the runner, and paints an El Dorado. The poor fellows will believe him if he tells them the trees of America bear golden leaves. When the "American fever" seizes upon the peasant, it is the obliging runner who suggests mortgaging his home for the passage-money or who finds a buyer for his cows. Common laborers who have been in America are hired to go about among the peasants, flash money, clink glasses, and tell of the wonderful wages awaiting them. The decoy thus gets together a group who elect him leader and pay him so much per head to guide them to America. Little do the poor sheep suspect that their bell-wether is paid by the steamship agent for forming the group and by the employer to whom he delivers them. A forwarding business exists for sending penniless laborers to America as if they were commercial ware. Each leaves at home some relative under bonds that the laborer will within a year pay a certain sum as cost and profit of bringing him here, Parties, through-billed from their native village by a professional money-lender, are met at the right points by his confederates, coached in three lessons on what answers to make at Ellis Island, and delivered finally to the Pittsburgh "boarding-boss," or the Chicago saloon-keeper, who is recruiting labor on commission for a steel mill or a construction gang.