THE LAWS OF ALLEGIANCE. • J. T is very possible,
we think it nearly certain, that the Laws
of Allegiance will next Session come before Parliament in a very serious form. The "tall talk" in the American House of Representatives does not always mean much, more especially as that House has no direct connection with foreign affairs ; but there is no doubt that in this case the people of the United States share the feelings of their representatives. They have two motives for susceptibility upon the subject, one of which has entirely escaped publicists on this side of the Atlantic. In the first place, they dislike very much the idea of permitting immigrants to retain their former with their new allegiance, to have, as they express it, "two countries." Not to mention the use made of the old rule during the Civil War to avoid service, they wish that all immigrants who settle among them should look to America as their home, should cease to think about the "Old World," should, as they con- stantly tell the Irish, choose between the " Starry " flag and the Green one. They want America to absorb, and not simply to be visited by, Europeans. In the second place, the grievance is the only one which combines two classes of settlers usually antagonistic—the Germans and the Irish. Naturally, the Germans who emigrate do it just before they would be liable to military service, and naturally also the German Governments, who regard the liability to conscription as a semi-sacred obligation, catch them whenever they go back again. On the other hand, the Irish complain that when arrested in England for political offences, they can get no help what- ever from the American Minister, who does not consider them citizens of the United States in the full sense. They are refused, for example, the privilege, of which they think much, of being tried by mixed juries, a privilege intended, we may remark, only to secure the intelligibility to the jury of the prisoner's defence. The Germans and Irish combined are very powerful, and American politicians are naturally anxious that their pet grievance, which seems to them a mere relic of bygone ideas, of the personal relation between subject and monarch, should be removed. We have little doubt negotia- tions on the subject will be commenced both with Prussia and England, and as little that if the American Government will meet some serious difficulties of detail in a frank spirit those negotiations will be successful. There is really nothing to resist, though there is a great deal to arrange. There may be even in England, and there certainly are in Prussia, a few people remaining who consider a transfer of allegiance a moral wrong ; who hold, to quote the extreme example, that for a person born in England to fire on a Queen's ship is an act of treachery deserving of the gallows ; who think, as, for instance, Galt the novelist thought, and said in a speech of strangely pathetic eloquence put into the month of Laurie Todd, that a man who changed his allegiance " betrayed " his country, but statesmen have become more cosmopolitan in their ideas. With them the question will be simply one of national expediency, and national expediency tells all on one side. There? no use whatever in keeping an unwilling subject who lives abroad, in forcing a man to render service the value of which consists in the willingness with which it is rendered. The only result of such laws is to compel those who are subjected to them to fight, if they do fight, with a halter round their necks, that is, to make them admirable enemies ; or if they do not fight, to reduce them to neutrals who earnestly desire the victory of the illegal cause. In no case can any assistance be obtained from them, for though we admit the occasional value of an unwilling ally, the unwillingness is 'effective when there is no power of compulsion ; and even in Prussia the law, instead of yielding unwilling conscripts to the Army, only serves to keep wealthy, and therefore useful, visitors away.
Of the law itself there can be no doubt. Allegiance, by the admission of all American as well as all European legalists, cannot be terminated in the present state of the law by the act of the person subject to the law. A man might as well claim the right to advertise that he would never keep a contract, and plead that as a reason why breach of contract on his part was not punishable by law. The practice supports the theory, for we still claim the right of shooting British subjects taken in arms against the Queen, and though we seldom actually execute, the right has never been abandoned. What should we lose if it were ? Simply a proud but most unreal belief that British citizenship can never be shaken off, that the Queen can claim her subject, the country its citizen under all circumstances, that nothing save death can terminate the obligations of the Briton to his flag? What is that belief in practice worth? Nothing at all. Every year a hundred or two hundred thousand persons quit the United Kingdom for an alien or, it may be, hostile shore, enlist in its armies, swell its revenues, cultivate its fields, add their whole strength to its resources for war as well as peace. We have no means, even if we had the will, to stop that process, to check this extraordinary exodus,—far more marvellous than the outpouring of Asia upon Europe which crushed the Roman world,—which is every year hurrying an army as great as Attila's from the old world to the new. To hold these emigrants to their allegiance is folly. We cannot hold them. All we can do is by claiming to hold them to make them rather more deadly enemies than they otherwise would become. But if they return ? They must return either as friends or foes. If as friends, they will swell our resources quite as much under the name of Americans as under that of American Irish ; if as enemies, their double nationality is an additional difficulty in the way of dealing with them. They claim all the sym- pathy due to political martyrs, and all the diplomatic protec- tion sometimes accorded to concealed filibusters. Kelly and Deasy, if Americans, would be ordinary pirates, invaders un- recognized by their own country and unacknowledged by ours, liable to the fate of such men—military execution. The mixed jury of which they think so much is a merely muni- cipal institution, which has become wholly unnecessary, which can be abolished in a month, and which is never claimed by men of any other race, who know quite well their own countrymen will give them the benefit of fewer doubts than the placable English bourgeois. Nationality gives no right of invasion, and what except invasion have we to dread from foreigners? But they may repent and become British citizens again ? Certainly they may, and we have only to make naturalization easy to gratify to the full that most laudable desire. As a matter of fact there are not twenty applications a year for naturalization, for the very simple reason that in England every resident is treated as a British subject, unless he himself pleads that he objects to be so treated. At least one alien is a Member of Parliament, and there are hundreds who, if the question were ever seriously mooted, would find it impossible to prove their nationality, How many sugar-bakers, or tailors, or confectioners in London ever take out letters of naturalization ? The truth is, that partly from indifference, partly from an honest belief that the stranger within our gates brings aid and not injury, we do already, without law, all the Americans are about to say ought to be done by Difficulties of detail there will be, we admit, and some of them of a very serious character. The change can be effected only by treaty, and that treaty must, to some extent, override municipal law. For one example, we cannot either permit or claim the right of naturalization without consent, reasonable delay, and legal formalities. A man may reside fifty years in a foreign country, and if he continuously claims British protection he must be protected, if necessary, by the national sword. Not to protect him is to resign our claim to be a nation. Then we cannot be permitted to deny the right, say, of a French tribunal to judge M. Louis Blanc par contumace for articles in the Temps, merely because he has resided and been respected among us for sixteen years. He must perform some act to be specified by treaty relieving himself of French rights and acquiring ours,—we beg his pardon heartily for sug- gesting even as an argument such a degradation. Nor can the United States be permitted to decree a three months' or one month's residence, sufficient for naturalization by international law. That would be simply to decree that every Canadian sailor was at liberty to choose between two sides with- out really accepting the obligations of either, a position practically intolerable. Some formal and visible mode of naturalization must be settled by treaty, to the immense con- tent of Americans on the seaboard, who are now crushed by immigrant votes thrown by persons who have never complied with any law at all. And finally, it will be necessary to abolish the absurd laws under which, in most countries, aliens not naturalized are forbidden to acquire real estate, laws which, for example, if naturalization meant the renunciation of one's own country, would empty Geneva of its richest and most use- ful landed proprietors. But with these details arranged we see no reason why any man residing abroad, after a delay, say, of one year, should not be allowed to select the nationality to which he chooses to belong. If an Irish- man in America likes to be an American, why not let him ? why compel him to be a subject of Her Majesty just when his subjection prevents our punishing him for invasion without national warrant ? There is no need to compel any man to quit us, and so justification for doing it ; but there is also no need to prevent him, and only an imaginary justification for doing it. " Allegiance " is not an abstract moral virtue, but a duty of citizenship imposed for the common good, like the duty of paying taxes ; and to claim the allegiance of an Irishman in Illinois because he was born without his own consent in Cork, is as absurd as it would be to claim a right to tax him for the same reason. If he may pay taxes to buy bullets to shoot us with, as he must by all laws municipal and international, why may he not also fire off the bullets ? Let the man choose, and having chosen, treat him as if he were by birth a subject of another State, as he is by a much better right, his own decision.
But we may be asked, granting the rightfulness of the change, why should it be made ? Why not leave things as they have existed ever since the consolidation of the feudal order of society ? For two reasons ; first, that a powerful ally, who may be a dangerous enemy, asks us to make the change ; and, secondly, because the change would be greatly to our political advantage. The first reason needs no com- ment except this, that no journal will advocate resistance to America in a just cause—like, for example, the seizure of the Trent,—sooner than ours ; but this, while emigration is allowed or encouraged, is not a just cause. The second is much more complete than ordinary politicians think. These Americanized Irish are a nuisance, simply because they are Irish Americanized, and not Americans pure and simple. If they were, their own Government would have the business of controlling them, or would be responsible for them. If they were, they would not be patriots, but foreign invaders, liable under a strong Alien Act to summary deportation, or to be treated as invaders taken with arms in their hands. If they were, the patriotism of the country would not be confused by a vague notion which, if English- men ever formulized anything, would probably express itself in a doubt whether, after all, the "sacred right of insurrec- tion" did not somehow exist. It is we, not the Americans, who -will gain, and gain very greatly, by surrendering a claim which we can never enforce when it would be useful, which hampers our domestic action against conspirators, and which is as inconsistent with the ideas of the nineteenth century as the right of persecution. All facts must sooner or later be recognized by wise legislators, and the grand fact of our gene- ration, the fact before which new Army Bills are trivialities, is that Europe pours an army of 300,000 souls every year
into North America, an army which Europe may claim if it pleases, but which becomes, in all substantial points, heartily American.
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