will appear below. Take, for instance, the figures 1 for the period of five years 1908-12, inclusive:

TABLE XIII

NUMBER OF DECLARATIONS FILED EACH YEAR, 1908-12, WITH AVERAGE NUMBER AND RATIO OF PETITIONS CONSUMMATING IN FIVE-YEAR PERIOD ENDING EACH YEAR

Take it another way, remembering that each declaration of intention has a valid lifetime of seven yearsfive after the two which must elapse before it can be made the basis of a final petition. Assuming that the petitions consummating the declarations of any given year are distributed approximately evenly over the five-year period during which they are valid for that purpose, then one-twenty-fifth of the declarations of 1908-18 covered by Table XIII eventuated in petitions in 1910, two-twenty-fifths in 1911, and so on, reaching five-twenty-fifths in 1914, and falling again to one-twenty-fifth in 1918. The following diagrammatic table, tracing out on this basis the probable distribution of the declarations consummated by the petitions filed from 1908 to 1918, inclusive, shows graphically the 1 Compiled from Reports of the Commissioner of Naturalization, 1908-1918.

weight which should be given to the petitions of each year, in calculating the ratio of declarations to petitions. It fully substantiates the showing of Table XIII, and justifies the assertion that 35 out of every 100 declarants fail to file petitions within the period now fixed by the law.

TABLE XIV

SHOWING NUMBER OF DECLARATIONS FILED IN EACH YEAR DURING THE PERIOD 1908-1912, AND THE NUMBER OF FINAL PETITIONS FOR NATURALIZATION ASSUMED TO HAVE BEEN BASED UPON THOSE DECLARATIONS IN EACH YEAR DURING WHICH, RESPECTIVELY, THE DECLARATIONS WERE VALID

The chances of error in this calculation lie in the facts (1) that until September, 1913, declarations made under the law as it existed prior to 1906 (the so-called "old-law declarations") were held to be valid, no matter how old their date; (2) that the decision of the United States District Court,' applying the seven-year

1 See p. 109.

limit to all outstanding declarations, undoubtedly hastened many petitions in 1913-14, and (3) that the effects of the war in Europe probably were in some cases to expedite and in others to delay or to prevent the filing of petitions. Undoubtedly some of the petitions of 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1913 are attributable to declarations more than seven years old, and some which in normal conditions would have been filed during the period 1914-18 were not filed.

It may be assumed, however, that these factors to a great extent offset each other, and that in any case their effect is negligible. And if it should appear that a substantial number of "old-law declarations," originating prior to 1908, were accepted up to 1918 by those courts which did not promptly accept the seven-year decision, it would mean only that the percentage of 65.1 is too high; that more than 35 declarations out of 100 do not eventuate in petitions.

Right here it must be emphasized that the figure 65.1 applies not to naturalization, but to petitions for naturalization, which is a very different thing indeed. We shall elsewhere learn1 that 11.5 per cent of all petitions are denied more than half of the denials being for reasons of a technical character.

The average of 35.1 of "sterile" declarations is that for the United States as a whole; but the figure is by no means constant or uniform. In some states the proportion of petitions to declarations is very much lower than that; in some it is very much higher.

In Indiana, for example, the figures show a fruition in petitions of only 26.4, or a little more than 1 in 4, while in Wisconsin the petitions exceed the declarations by 15.7 per cent. As the above table shows, in four states the proportion of petitions exceeded 80 per cent, while

1 See p. 231.

14 scaled down from 80 to 70 per cent. Twenty-six states show percentages below the 65.1 of the United States as a whole.

TABLE XV

SHOWING RATIO OF DECLARATIONS OF INTENTION TO PETITIONS FOR NATURALIZATION, BY STATES, BASED ON YEARLY AVERAGE NUMBER OF DECLARATIONS, 1908 to 1912, AND YEARLY AVERAGE (WEIGHTED)1

1The averages are weighted as per the table above, p. 221.

The most important question raised by the results of this calculation is whether it is reasonable to expect

that more than one out of every three declarations of intention should thus fail of fruition-that thirty-five out of every hundred aliens who declare their intention to apply for citizenship should fail to do so. The answer to this question, and the reasons for the failure, are not discoverable in the figures themselves, nor in any documents to be found anywhere. The reasons are human reasons, hidden in the bosoms and written in the personal experience, of men and women who started out after the privileges of American citizenship, and changed their minds.

We have some illuminating data, first-hand, from some twenty-six thousand aliens who did follow up their declarations, and afford in the process a good deal of extraordinarily interesting and enlightening information, the study of which is set forth in the succeeding chapter of this volume.