These demands upon this service and the offices of the clerks of courts are so great that the government is being severely criticized for not providing facilities for both the discharged soldiers and civilian foreign born to take steps toward procuring their American citizenship to which they are justly entitled. A GREAT COMPOSITE RECORD OF LOYALTY Mr. Raymond F. Crist, then Director of Citizenship in the Bureau of Naturalization, pays a well-deserved tribute to the loyalty and the sacrifices of the foreign born, and points to the enhanced responsibility laid upon us by the service these men gave. In his report to the Commissioner of Naturalization,[148] “Concerning Americanization Activities,” Mr. Crist says, in part: The names upon the roll of honor of the nation that were cabled back by the American Expeditionary Forces in France give emphatic testimony to the loyalty of the foreign born. The names on the rolls represent all European nationalities. So strongly in evidence were these names that they might well have been the rosters of the dead and wounded of any or all the European countries. The percentage of distinctly non-Anglo-Saxon names was exceedingly high. These lists still give mute testimony to the fact that the immigrant and the immigrant’s sons have laid down their lives for the land of their adoption. When the final records are computed they will undoubtedly show the presence in the military forces of our nation of the full quota of those of foreign birth. Their presence in our military and naval forces has worked a transformation with them. It has created an after-war debt and obligation upon the United States. The alien-born soldier has returned to America an educated and transformed individual. He is an American in all the senses. Without intention to cavil or quibble about what Mr. Crist says--for what he says is essentially true--it is needful to remember that neither the stress of emotion under which these mass ceremonies at the camps were conducted, nor the act and fact of naturalization itself, nor yet, in any substantial way, the experiences in the army, could make new creatures of these men. They were afterward--they are now, especially in the chill reaction from the exuberance of that excited period--what they were before--“just folks”--good, bad, and indifferent, like the rest of us. But there is this difference in what it means to them: They were _welcomed_ into citizenship without the heart-breaking, gnat-straining suspicion through which, in normal times, they would have had to go if they went at all. And no politician urged or herded them into voting status and power at any stage of it. For their American citizenship and share in the common sovereignty they are under obligation to nobody. They bought what they got, as it were, with their own blood.