The aggregate of such surplus items, which cannot be regarded as other than a trust fund in essence, and even deducting the amount expended for military naturalizations amounts to $539,446.80. It would easily have been much more if the clerks had been furnished to serve the aliens who desired to become citizens. The burst of public sympathy for, and interest in, the young alien who entered our service to make the “supreme sacrifice” for democracy which found expression in a special appropriation of $400,000 to pay the cost of making these young heroes citizens in law, as they already are in heart, over a period of 13½ months, did not, in fact, cost the people of this country as a whole anything. As long as over half a million dollars of the fund contributed by the newly made citizens from civil life remain unexpended for the purposes for which it was paid, it would appear to the ordinary observer that they, and not the general body of American citizens, gave the $400,000 to pay for the cost of giving free of charge the well-deserved “priceless heritage of American citizenship” to the young alien soldiers who fought for liberty and this country. The government of the United States is making money out of the business of admitting aliens to citizenship, and is not keeping fairly or efficiently its end of the transaction. In the period since the enactment of the Naturalization Law, as Commissioner Campbell has said, aliens in pursuit of citizenship--even though thousands of them did not get it!--have paid fees to an amount exceeding by more than half a million dollars the total cost of the Naturalization Bureau--a margin itself larger by more than $200,000 than the total appropriation for the Bureau in any year save one.[96]