Cumulatively effective usage and the exigencies of a large, varied, shifting and extensive maritime trade have
in the course of time brought merchant shipping to something approaching a neutral footing. For most, one might venture to say for virtually all, routine purposes of business and legal liability the merchant shipping comes under the jurisdiction of the local courts, without reservation. It is true, there still are formalities and reservations which enable questions arising out of incidents in the shipping trade to become subject of international conference and adjustment, but they are after all not such as would warrant the erection of national apparatus to take care of them in case they were not already covered by usage to that effect. The visible drift of usage toward neutralisation in merchant shipping, in maritime trade, and in international commercial transactions, together with the similarly visible feasibility of a closer approach to unreserved neutralisation of this whole range of traffic, suggests that much the same line of considerations should apply as regards the personal and pecuniary rights of citizens traveling or residing abroad. The extreme,—or, as seen from the present point of view, the ultimate—term in the relinquishment of national pretensions along this line would of course be the neutralisation of citizenship.
This is not so sweeping a move as a patriotically-minded person might imagine on the first alarm, so far as touches the practical status of the ordinary citizen in his ordinary relations, and particularly among the English-speaking peoples. As an illustrative instance, citizenship has sat somewhat lightly on the denizens of the American republic, and with no evident damage to the community at large or to the inhabitants in detail. Naturalisation has been easy, and has been sought with no more eagerness, on the whole, than the notably low terms of its acquirement would indicate. Without loss or discomfort many
law-abiding aliens have settled in this country and spent the greater part of a life-time under its laws without becoming citizens, and no one the worse or the wiser for it. Not infrequently the decisive inducement to naturalisation on the part of immigrant aliens has been, and is, the desirability of divesting themselves of their rights of citizenship in the country of their origin. Not that the privilege and dignity of citizenship, in this or in any other country, is to be held of little account. It is rather that under modern civilised conditions, and among a people governed by sentiments of humanity and equity, the stranger within our gates suffers no obloquy and no despiteful usage for being a stranger. It may be admitted that of late, with the fomentation of a more accentuated nationalism by politicians seeking a raison d'être, additional difficulties have been created in the way of naturalisation and the like incidents. Still, when all is told of the average American citizen, qua citizen, there is not much to tell. The like is true throughout the English-speaking peoples, with inconsequential allowance for local color. A definitive neutralisation of citizenship within the range of these English-speaking countries would scarcely ripple the surface of things as they are—in time of peace.
All of which has not touched the sore and sacred spot in the received scheme of citizenship and its rights and liabilities. It is in the event of hostilities that the liabilities of the citizen at home come into the foreground, and it is as a source of patriotic grievance looking to warlike retaliation that the rights of the citizen abroad chiefly come into the case.
If, as was once, almost inaudibly, hinted by a well-regarded statesman, the national establishment should
refuse to jeopardise the public peace for the safeguarding of the person and property of citizens who go out in partes infidelium on their own private concerns, and should so leave them under the uncurbed jurisdiction of the authorities in those countries into which they have intruded, the result might in many cases be hardship to such individuals. This would, of course, be true almost exclusively of such instances only as occur in such localities as are, temporarily or permanently, outside the pale of modern law and order. And, it may be in place to remark, instances of such hardship, with the accompanying hazard of national complications, would, no doubt, greatly diminish in frequency consequent upon the promulgation of such a disclaimer of national responsibility for the continued well-being of citizens who so expatriate themselves in the pursuit of their own advantage or amusement. Meantime, let it not seem inconsiderate to recall that to the community at large the deplorable case of such expatriates under hardship involves no loss or gain in the material respect; and that, except for the fortuitous circumstance of his being a compatriot, the given individual's personal or pecuniary fortune in foreign parts has no special claim on his compatriots' sympathy or assistance; from which it follows also that with the definitive neutralisation of citizenship as touches expatriates, the sympathy which is now somewhat unintelligently confined to such cases, on what may without offense be called extraneous grounds, would somewhat more impartially and humanely extend to fellowmen in distress, regardless of nativity or naturalisation.
What is mainly to the point here, however, is the fact that if citizenship were so neutralised within the range of neutral countries here contemplated, one further source
of provocation to international jealousy and distrust would drop out of the situation. And it is not easy to detect any element of material loss involved in such a move. In the material respect no individual would be any the worse off, with the doubtful and dubious exception of the expatriate fortune-hunter, who aims to fish safely in troubled waters at his compatriots' expense. But the case stands otherwise as regards the balance of immaterial assets. The scaffolding of much highly-prized sentiment would collapse, and the world of poetry and pageantry—particularly that of the tawdrier and more vendible poetry and pageantry—would be poorer by so much. The Man Without a Country would lose his pathetic appeal, or would at any rate lose much of it. It may be, of course, that in the sequel there would result no net loss even in respect of these immaterial assets of sentimental animation and patriotic self-complacency, but it is after all fairly certain that something would be lost, and it is by no means clear what if anything would come in to fill its place.
An historical parallel may help to illustrate the point. In the movement out of what may be called the royal age of dynasties and chivalric service, those peoples who have moved out of that age and out of its spiritual atmosphere have lost much of the conscious magnanimity and conviction of merit that once characterised that order of things, as it still continues to characterise the prevalent habit of mind in the countries that still continue under the archaic order of dynastic mastery and service. But it is also to be noted that these peoples who so have moved out of the archaic order appear to be well content with this change of spiritual atmosphere, and they are even fairly well persuaded, in the common run, that the move