“I found in a majority of cases aliens in the armed service were as enthusiastic as our own native-born sons.” HERE WAS “ATTACHMENT TO OUR PRINCIPLES”! The naturalization of an alien under our laws [says Commissioner Campbell][145] may be compared justly to the “coming of age” celebration of the heir of a great estate. It is the formal recognition of an accomplished fact, the attainment of manhood with all of its implications of the putting away of childish things and the assumption of the obligations that mark the mature and responsible personality.... The vital thing to bear in mind in considering the statistics of naturalization is that these figures represent human beings, and human beings in that most important stage of human progress stepping upward from the infantile stage of blind and unquestioning obedience, backed by external compulsion, to the plane of political maturity which not alone has a part in the making of laws, but, what is more important, must obey the laws from an inward and self-imposed sense of obligation.... Genuine citizenship is primarily a state of inward feeling, and only secondarily one of knowledge. It is not impossible for one to be a good citizen who is ignorant of the forms of our government or who even has no very clear mental conception of the basic principles upon which it is founded. The completion of the nationalizing process is marked for every essential spiritual purpose, as Professor Weatherly said,[146] “when the things of the spirit are held in common and cherished by all,” or, as Renan expresses it, when the people “have a common glory,” by reason of having “done great things together.” * * * * * How may a man more convincingly show his “attachment to the principles of the Constitution,” his benevolence toward “the good order and happiness” of his country, than by imperiling his life for it? “Greater love hath no man than this.” A candidate for naturalization, in ordinary conditions exhibiting knowledge of the legal relationship between the Federal and state governments, knowing the name of the President of the United States, the date of the battle of Bunker Hill, the cause of Shay’s Rebellion, and when the yellow fever came to Boston, may have no more idea of what the flag of the United States means and might mean than he has of the mental processes of the ichthyosaurus; his very plenitude of intellectual accomplishment may indeed make him only the greater menace to the essential welfare of his community.