My judgment is that this government has occasion for greater fear from many of the educated foreigners than from the uneducated foreigner. More stress should be placed upon the character of the man and his loyalty to this government, and his willingness to abide by its laws and uphold its Constitution than upon his mere educational qualifications. My observation has led me to conclude that one of the chief difficulties with the administration of our naturalization laws is that the Department seems inclined to apply to all foreigners the same test; whether the applicant has been a resident of the community for twenty-five years, leading an exemplary life, upholding all the institutions, interested in all the efforts to upbuild the state physically, mentally, and morally, or whether he be a unit in the slum hordes of the city. The Department seems to have conceived it to be its duty to force all of them into the same strait-jacket.... I have in mind cases where the Department has endeavored to withhold citizenship on the merest technicality from men who for years have been our best citizens, thoroughly loyal and devoted to the best interests of the state. We seem to have gone upon the theory that the educated foreigner, by reason of his education alone, will necessarily be a good citizen, and that the ignorant foreigner is necessarily an undesirable citizen. An educational test, such as that to which petitioners for naturalization are subjected by some judges and some naturalization examiners, applied at the ballot box to all who would vote, would wreak havoc upon the enrollment of both native and naturalized. It is safe to say that not one out of a hundred of native-born citizens, even college educated, could pass respectably the examination. A very small proportion of American-born citizens of any age or of either sex have read the Constitution of the United States or have even a superficial knowledge of its contents. The present writer has derived some amusement during his conduct of this investigation from asking of more than ordinarily intelligent acquaintances some of the questions to which applicants for naturalization have to respond in various courts. The ignorance of even fundamental matters displayed by these scions of the “old stock” has been almost invariably both ludicrous and lamentable.