the permission of the country of origin, that country may, if it chooses, grant complete alienation, or it may grant alienation with permission to retain the original citizenship. In making a contract of naturalization with a foreign country, it may concede the right of the foreign country to claim the naturalized person as a citizen, but before this goes into effect it may also grant to this person a right, if he chooses, to retain at the same time his original citizenship. The person possessing this right, after naturalization in a foreign country, becomes, from the point of view of that country, one of its citizens, and it may claim for him the right to be treated as such; but, from the point of view of the country of origin, the person is still its citizen, although it has agreed to treat him, when this is insisted upon, as a citizen of the other country. From the point of view of the person himself, he is a citizen of both countries. This is dual citizenship.

This reasoning is, no doubt, grossly sophistical; but it is the only reasoning, apparently, on which dual citizenship can rest. Whatever validity it may seem to possess is the same whether a treaty of naturalization exists or not. The existence of a treaty does not affect this reasoning, unless the treaty contains an express renunciation of all former relations to the naturalized person by the state of his origin; for, without that renunciation, the state of origin may still privately retain with the person naturalized all the relations it has ever had with him, so far as he chooses to accept them and the state of origin to grant them. If dual citizenship can exist at all, it can exist as well under a naturalization treaty as without it, because the recognition that the naturalized person as a citizen of the foreign state is not incompatible with his remaining a citizen of his native country.

It has been claimed by certain expositors of this German law that, although the provision for dual citizenship exists in the law, it does not apply to persons of German origin who have been naturalized as citizens of the United States; the reason being that there is a treaty of naturalization with the United States. We have just seen, however, that, if dual citizenship is a normal status, it makes no difference whether a treaty exists or not, unless the treaty explicitly excludes dual citizenship and expressly renounces all relations with the naturalized person except as a citizen of the foreign state.

It is true that in section 36 of this German law the statement is made: "Treaties concluded by the Federal States with foreign countries prior to the going into effect of this law remain undisturbed."

What is the meaning of the statement that these treaties "remain undisturbed"? If dual citizenship is a normal status, of course these treaties remain undisturbed. There is nothing in that status to disturb them. There is no denial in this law that a naturalized citizen of a foreign country is really a citizen of that country, and is to be treated as such. This obligation, imposed by the treaty, is undisturbed. But, on the theory that dual citizenship is in any case permissible, these same persons, while being American citizens, may at the same time remain Germans; or, to give to dual citizenship the full benefit of its implications, they are "German-Americans."

The laws of the United States recognize no such hyphenated citizens. A person is either an American or he is not. If he is an American he is not in any legal sense a German, and if he is in any legal sense a German he is not an American. There can be but one allegiance.

This is a consequence of the nature of citizenship, not of a treaty. But those who defend the German law of dual citizenship pretend that, while it applies to the citizens of other nations, it does not apply to citizens of the United States, because of a treaty which prevents that application.

The so-called "Bancroft Treaties" of naturalization between the United States and certain German States, negotiated in 1868, if not abrogated by a state of war, or by the German formula, rebus sic stantibus, which German jurists affirm justifies the abrogation of any treaty when it is an advantage to abrogate it, may be assumed to be in force, but they do not undertake to define citizenship.

Let us take, for example, the treaty concluded on February 22, 1868, between the plenipotentiaries of the President of the United States of America and His Majesty the King of Prussia in the name of the North German Confederation. Assuming that this treaty is now in force, and that it comes under the rubric of "treaties concluded by the Federal States with foreign countries," although it has been assumed in the United States that naturalization terminates all relations between the naturalized citizen and the country of his origin, there is nothing in this treaty that affirms it. If dual citizenship, apart from any treaty, is a normal status, as the German law regards it, this treaty is wholly "undisturbed." A former German has become an American citizen. The German law of dual citizenship does not deny that. It does not deny anything which the treaty contains. It merely holds that, since dual citizenship is a normal status, this American citizen may remain

also a German; because the sovereign who agrees that he is, after naturalization, to be regarded as an American citizen, permits him to remain what he was before, a German citizen. This permission is, of course, no part of the treaty contract; but, if dual citizenship is a normal status, it does not affect the contract. The person, from the German point of view, is all that the treaty pretends that he is, a naturalized citizen of the United States. If the Imperial German Government is graciously disposed to regard him, in addition, as also still a German citizen, and informs him that he is one, is it not still within its sovereign right?

Undoubtedly, the validity of this ingenious reasoning depends entirely upon dual citizenship being a normal status. If citizenship is necessarily single, and not dual, and the act of naturalization, ipso facto, terminates absolutely citizenship in the state of origin, what becomes of this whole effort to set up in this German law the idea of dual citizenship in any direction, or for any purpose? Why was this plan put into operation six months before the outbreak of a general war, and made a correlate to the revision of the military law? What purpose was this new ambiguity respecting citizenship to serve? Why, with treaties or without treaties, should citizens of other nationalities have provisions expressly made for them to class them as Germans when they were not Germans, if it was an honest intention to respect. the treaties of naturalization as they had always been interpreted?

The whole conception of dual citizenship, then, either falls to the ground, or it must be regarded as a scheme for obscuring and confusing the obligations of citizenship, leaving ill-instructed persons to suppose that they can claim citizenship in two countries at the same time, that they therefore have a divided allegiance, and that they can serve the interests of one country under the cover of citizenship in another. But the idea of dual citizenship does not fall to the ground as a mere sophistical speculation, a purely innocuous conception, like the fourth dimension of space. It assumes in this German law the form of a legal reality. It asserts that the same person may be at the same time a naturalized citizen of a foreign country and a German citizen. Saying to us, in the United States, that our citizenship is not affected by it, because a treaty exists and is not "disturbed," does not explain the adoption of this dual citizenship at the time and in the manner in which it became law in Germany for obviously military reasons. Taken in connection with the activities of naturalized citizens who were formerly

Germans, and may still regard themselves as Germans under this law, this new theory of citizenship deserves all the public attention it has received. How imperfectly the treaties, which are not "disturbed," protect the United States from the secret application of this dual conception of citizenship becomes evident when we ask ourselves, What is the substance of these treaties? The first article of the treaty with the North German Confederation reads:

Citizens of the North German Confederation, who become naturalized citizens of the United States of America and shall have resided uninterruptedly within the United States five years, shall be held by the North German Confederation to be American citizens, and shall be treated as such.

A reciprocal agreement is made regarding citizens of the United States naturalized in Germany.

But what protection does this engagement afford against dual citizenship? Until this conception was brought into public controversy, it was probably never doubted that German citizenship and American citizenship are mutually exclusive; that is, that one can not be a German and an American at the same time. By every canon of sound judgment, when a person becomes an American citizen he ceases to be a German. The whole meaning and value of nationality turn upon that distinction. A "German-American" is a political impossibility. A choice, free from all ambiguity, must be made, or citizenship does not exist at all. To profess to be both German and American is an act of equivocation that obscures the claim to be an American citizen in any acceptable sense. But what security against this consequence is afforded by these treaties, which "remain undisturbed," if by private understanding between the person and the Imperial Government an original German citizenship also remains not only "undisturbed" but specifically legalized by German law?

If, as alleged, this dual citizenship was not intended to be applied in the United States, where was it intended to be applied? For what reason? In what conditions? Neither in this law itself, nor in any treaty with the United States, is this dual citizenship expressly excluded from application. The language regarding the effect of treaties employed in section 36 of the law is obviously vague and equivocal. The treaties themselves contain no definition of citizenship. If it was intended in drafting this German law to give assurance that dual citizenship would not be applied when naturalization treaties existed, why were not these treaties specified, or why was not language employed

that would make it perfectly plain that where such treaties previously existed the idea of duality could not and would not be applied? Why could it not have been stated plainly in this law, for example, when Germans become citizens in other countries where naturalization treaties exist, German citizenship wholly terminates with naturalization?

But there is still another method mentioned in this law of being and not being a citizen at the same time. "Citizenship is lost," according to section 17 of this German law, "by expatriation." But section 20 reads as follows:

Expatriation in one Federal State effects simultaneous expatriation in every other Federal State, unless the expatriated person reserves citizenship in another State by declaration before the competent authorities of the State granting expatriation.

A Prussian, under this section, it would seem, might "lose citizenship" in Germany by expatriation from Prussia, and at the same time regain it by reserving citizenship, let us say, in Saxony or Bavaria, or, better still, in Alsace-Lorraine, which has no treaty with the United States. If such a person should go to the United States and become naturalized as an American citizen, he would no longer be a Prussian; but he might, under the dual citizenship theory, be a Saxon or a Bavarian, or an Alsatian. In either case he would still be a German; for, by section 1 of this law, "A German is one who has citizenship in a Federal State or direct Imperial citizenship."

There remains the provision for acquiring this "direct Imperial citizenship," which applies to any person of German descent, no matter how far removed from an original German ancestor, or how long his forefathers may have lived in a foreign land. No residence or return to Germany is necessary for this restoration to German citizenship. Paragraph 2 of section 33 reads:

Direct Imperial citizenship may be granted to a former German, who has not taken up his residence in Germany; the same applies to one who is descended from a former German or has been adopted as a child of such.

Such are the various provisions for retaining or reacquiring German citizenship. No one of them appears to demand any publicity in the country where the person has been naturalized and continues to reside. He may, therefore, possess and exhibit American naturalization papers, and may at the same time possess and conceal a German certificate of citizenship.