NATURALIZATION

Is it possible for a person to be entirely naturalized?—­that is, to be denationalized, to cast off the prejudice and traditions of one country and take up those of another; to give up what may be called the instinctive tendencies of one race and take up those of another.  It is easy enough to swear off allegiance to a sovereign or a government, and to take on in intention new political obligations, but to separate one’s self from the sympathies into which he was born is quite another affair.  One is likely to remain in the inmost recesses of his heart an alien, and as a final expression of his feeling to hoist the green flag, or the dragon, or the cross of St. George.  Probably no other sentiment is, so strong in a man as that of attachment to his own soil and people, a sub-sentiment always remaining, whatever new and unbreakable attachments he may form.  One can be very proud of his adopted country, and brag for it, and fight for it; but lying deep in a man’s nature is something, no doubt, that no oath nor material interest can change, and that is never naturalized.  We see this experiment in America more than anywhere else, because here meet more different races than anywhere else with the serious intention of changing their nationality.  And we have a notion that there is something in our atmosphere, or opportunities, or our government, that makes this change more natural and reasonable than it has been anywhere else in history.  It is always a surprise to us when a born citizen of the United States changes his allegiance, but it seems a thing of course that a person of any other country should, by an oath, become a good American, and we expect that the act will work a sudden change in him equal to that wrought in a man by what used to be called a conviction of sin.  We expect that he will not only come into our family, but that he will at once assume all its traditions and dislikes, that whatever may have been his institutions or his race quarrels, the moving influence of his life hereafter will be the “Spirit of ’76.”

What is this naturalization, however, but a sort of parable of human life?  Are we not always trying to adjust ourselves to new relations, to get naturalized into a new family?  Does one ever do it entirely?  And how much of the lonesomeness of life comes from the failure to do it!  It is a tremendous experiment, we all admit, to separate a person from his race, from his country, from his climate, and the habits of his part of the country, by marriage; it is only an experiment differing in degree to introduce him by marriage into a new circle of kinsfolk.  Is he ever anything but a sort of tolerated, criticised, or admired alien?  Does the time ever come when the distinction ceases between his family and hers?  They say love is stronger than death.  It may also be stronger than family—­while it lasts; but was there ever a woman yet whose most ineradicable