Doubtless any particular year selected for the study would present certain special conditions calling for discount of the results. This is true of the year 1913-14. That year chanced to mark the end of the validity of the “old-law declarations”;--that is to say that in that year the seven-year limit upon the life of a declaration of intention to become a citizen, established for the first time by the Naturalization Act of 1906, was declared by the United States Court, 1914,[116] to apply to declarations made prior to the enactment of that statute. Undoubtedly anticipation of this tended on the whole to increase, perhaps materially, the number of petitions consummating those old declarations. On the other hand, there were doubtless many declarants of long ago who were discouraged by the decision from filing petitions at all. We shall observe later the extent to which that decision has been a factor in the rejection of the petitions of a large number of persons otherwise presumably eligible--excluded for that reason alone. Obviously it was desirable to select a year as recent as possible and at the same time to avoid any period affected by the complications introduced by the existence of the war in Europe. It is felt that the year 1913-14 is sufficiently typical for all practical purposes, and that the applicants for citizenship analyzed herein are sufficiently representative generally of the foreign born who seek to join us; whatever may be said of the great number who were swept into citizenship helter-skelter during and since the war by naturalization of soldiers and sailors on the sole ground of military service.[117] THE RACIAL GROUPS ARE TYPICAL Some of the important conclusions supported by these statistics naturally raise the question whether the petitions studied are, in respect of country of origin, really typical of the whole foreign-born population of the country. This question seems to be disposed of by a compilation showing the racial distribution of the petitioners studied, compared with the racial distribution of _all_ unnaturalized foreign-born white aliens 21 years of age or older in the country as a whole, and in the nine large cities covered by this investigation. TABLE XVI COMPARISON BY RACES OF (1) A NATURALIZATION PETITIONERS STUDIED, (2) UNNATURALIZED MALES TWENTY-ONE YEARS OR OVER IN NINE CITIES{1} WHERE PETITIONS WERE FILED, AND IN THE COUNTRY AS A WHOLE, IN 1910{2}