The intellect is not a test of good citizenship. I know many people with insufficient intellect to procure much education, who cannot read nor write, who are excellent citizens; and many others who are highly educated and too crooked to make good citizens.
A California judge avers:
My observation has been that many of our best citizens are those who possess no extended education, and some of the most dangerous are of those who possess high educational qualifications.
A judge in central New York, who has large experience with naturalization, says:
Too much stress is laid upon information concerning the details of our governmental system, and not enough upon the candidate’s personal record, endeavors, and results. An Italian laborer who has been unable to learn the number of Houses into which Congress is divided, but is hard-working, steady, possessed of a desire to own his home and bring his family up in our ways, is more useful to us than some of more intelligence.
He holds that the principal difficulty with which desirable immigrants have to contend, in seeking naturalization, is the fact that “too much technical information is demanded by the young men who represent the Bureau of Naturalization.”
Over against such expressions as these place the opinions of one of the Ohio judges, who, after the fashion of the Know-Nothings of the ’40’s, would require twenty-one years’ residence before naturalization and “add to, rather than diminish, the present requirements,” admitting “only heads of families, with children”; or those of the Arkansas judge who avowedly “construes everything against the applicant,” and would admit a German under no conditions until after fifty years of residence. Such a diversity indicates the sort of difficulty confronting the alien in court, and the need of some unity of standards to be created by law, and a great simplification of the tests and examinations.
A letter was addressed to a number of experienced judges, known for their wisdom and humanity, asking for a tentative set of questions designed to disclose the knowledge thought to be essential to embody “attachment to the principles of the Constitution.” Replies were few, but they evidenced the difficulty of expressing in words such an “attachment.” Many of the judges frankly confessed both their inability to produce any such exhibit, and their conviction that the intellectual display was of least importance in the test of the applicant.
THE CRAZE FOR “AMERICANIZING”—SOMEBODY ELSE!
When the Great War burst upon the world, with its various kinds of hysteria, many Americans suddenly awakened to a passion for what has come to be called “Americanization.” Every sort of foreign-born, foreign-speaking—or even foreign-looking—person was seized upon as a subject or victim of this vague and little-ordered movement, with results as various as the degree of intelligence involved on the part of the Americanizers and the kinds of treatment inflicted; but to a great extent mischievous and tending to arouse hostility rather than “Americanism”—whatever the much-abused term might mean—in the breasts of the bewildered immigrant. Some of the effort, to be sure, was intelligent, considerate, and constructive.