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late the privileges of, and the restrictions upon, the alien, with the exception that certain nations strong enough to enforce it have established in certain countries held by them to be less than fully "civilized," the principle of extra-territoriality, by virtue of which their nationals must be tried before special tribunals supervised by representatives of their own nation. Generally speaking, and subject to the rule that aliens of all races must be treated alike under processes of law, a nation may deprive the alien of liberty of action, may prohibit or restrict his ownership of property, may forbid or delimit his employment in certain kinds of work or enterprises, and may expel and deport him, at its pleasure. In other words, the status and rights of an alien are determined almost absolutely by the municipal law in the country in which he is domiciled. The only limitations upon this power are those established by treaties, and by the general spread of humane ideas, and the growing feeling-discouraged, perhaps, but by no means halted, by the World War of the solidarity of the human race.

In the United States, the rights of the alien include personal protection, protection of property already acquired, and the use of all means of redress and judicial protection enjoyed by citizens.1

The alien's plight in this country has been complicated by the peculiar relation subsisting between the Federal government and that of the individual states. For it has frequently happened that the government of the United States has been practically unable to enforce the rights of aliens created by treaty when traversed by state law. On more than one occasion

1 This is subject, of course, to the universal exceptions regarding alien enemies in time of war; also to such other exceptions as special statutes in certain states regarding the holding of real property and other matters.

threatening diplomatic situations have been created by the existence of this condition.

This ancient feeling toward the alien, and the treatment, legal, extra-legal, and illegal, to which he has been subjected in respect of his person, his family, and his property, undoubtedly have affected substantially his sentiments toward this country. Disillusionment about the atmosphere and ways of the "Land of the Free" is responsible for our loss of the citizenship of many desirable immigrants. The man who will not submit quietly to injustice is of the material of which our best citizens from the beginning have been made. The kind of aliens who can accept without resentment some of the things to which those of foreign birth and speech have been subjected within our borders during very recent times, are not fit to be Americans!1

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We are concerned just now, however, with the alien, not in his general legal or social relations, but as material for active membership in our community as an American citizen, as a voting participant in the sovereignty held in this country by the people. As such, he comes to a position unique in all the world. It is not yet true-perhaps it will be very long before it can be true that there is absolutely no bar to any person on account of race; for the law and its interpretations exclude from citizenship Chinese, Japanese, and certain people of India not regarded as “white”although the blacks of Africa are expressly admitted. Nevertheless it may be said broadly that, regardless of race, the immigrant can come to America and win his 1 See Kate Holladay Claghorn, The Immigrant's Day in Court (in preparation).

way upon his own merits into the fellowship of what all the world calls "Americans."

Now, what is "an American"? What is it that makes a nation of us if not a distinctive race? What is it that the immigrant joins, body and soul, when he becomes an American"?

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Every little while somebody arises with ashes upon his head and bemoans the threatened disappearance of what he is pleased to call "the American type." He never describes it-it is exceedingly difficult to learn what may be meant by the phrase. This is not strange, for there is no such thing if a racial type is meant. There never has been any such thing.

Perhaps we know what the expression might mean in New England-a combination of English, Scotch, or Welsh, who in turn would be bred of Dane, Pict, and Scot, Saxon and Norman and Kelt, with perhaps a strain of French, or maybe of Dutch. In Pennsylvania very likely it would be English Quaker— or Plattdeutsch. The French-Spanish combination in the Gulf region, the Scandinavian or German in the Middle West and Northwest, the SpanishMexican along the Rio Grande and in southern California, and so on, are "American" by a title as good as that of those who trace their descent from the Pilgrim Fathers.

John Graham Brooks' remarks that "our piebald millions" are now so interwoven with all that we are "that to silhouette the American becomes yearly more baffling." Says he:

...

The early writers have no such misgivings. . In 1889 I met a German correspondent who had been four times to the United States. . . . He said he brought back from his first journey a clearly conceived image of the American. He was

1 John Graham Brooks, As Others See Us, 1909.

"sharp-visaged, nervous, lank, and restless." After the second trip this group of adjectives was abandoned. He saw so many people who were not lank or nervous; so many were rotund and leisurely, that he rearranged his classification, but still with confidence. After a third trip he insisted that he could still describe our countrymen, but not by external signs. He was driven to express them in terms of character. The American was resourceful, inventive, and supreme in the pursuit of material ends. "My fourth trip," he said, "has knocked out the final attempt with the others. I have thrown them all over like a lot of rubbish. I don't know what the American is, and I don't believe anyone else knows."

Prof. Franklin H. Giddings, in an informal address at Columbia University, undertook, albeit somewhat casually, to point out the characteristics which should mark a good American. He must be loyal, must "play the game"; must have a local pride not only in the quality of his country but in his home community, feeling and exemplifying a moral and civic responsibility for the betterment of conditions actuated by a wise and constructive idealism. Recognizing, no doubt, in the very saying of this, that these things would mark the good citizen of any nation, he protested that after all was said, and despite the difficulty of precise definition, there was something distinctive, perceptible, and, in fact, perceived by the discerning; real, however subtle and elusive, distinguishing the true American from all other folk-"a certain sensitiveness to the finer values of life; an admiration for these things."

Well, certainly the ideal American is, and has, and does all of this; certainly all Americans ought to be, and have, and do all of it! But in all candor and fairness it must be acknowledged that it would be invidious and altogether insupportable to claim it or

any of it as in any proper sense racially distinctive of America.

THE AMERICAN HAS NO RACIAL MARKS

We cannot isolate any physical characteristics; we cannot segregate any particular racial descent; one may search in vain for any definable hereditary mental or spiritual characteristic that will fit or typify all, or even many, of the "piebald millions" who inhabit and vote, attain success and honor, and, at need, enlist or be conscripted for war, in the varied jurisdictions of our tremendous stretch of territory between the ancient French-Canadian colonies of Maine and the Philippines; between the Virgin Islands and Alaska. Even local adherence to our slogans of liberty, democracy, consent-of-the-governed, and all the rest of our ecstatic vocabulary, no longer insulates or distinguishes us in the world. The upspringing democracies of the Old World, to which we have given example and inspiration as well as emancipation from old autocracies, swear by all these phrases as exuberantly as we, and may even outstrip us in the political incarnation of the ideals which hitherto we have regarded as so peculiarly our own!

If, then, we can distinguish "the American" neither by any physical attribute of race nor by adherence to political forms and formulæ, what is there left for us to conserve and to boast about

as our very own? Let us come straight to the fact that this absence of exclusive racial marks is the distinguishing physical characteristic of the American. True of him as of no other now or ever in the past, is the fact that he is, broadly speaking, the product of all races. It is of our fundamental history and tradition from the beginning that in America all peoples may find destination,

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