In the modern world citizenship has come to mean membership in a political community. It involves the status of an individual with reference to a particular state. And that status is determined by the laws of the individual states, for everywhere it is stoutly maintained that the right to determine how and when a person may become and remain a citizen is one of the first prerogatives of sovereignty. In a number of recent works on citizenship the question has been raised whether the bond of citizenship is by nature contractual. The affirmative is held by Prof. Andrew Weiss of the University of Paris; he declares it to be “generally recognized that the bond of nationality is a contractual one; and that the bond uniting to the state each of its citizens is formed by an agreement of their wills, express or implied.” This view is rejected as unsound by various English and American publicists.[16] These writers assert that whatever may be the theory of the origin of the state, the fact is that the relation of the citizen to the state is a relation _sui generis_, and that the admission of a person to membership in a state is an act of sovereignty. The law of the state is supreme. The reasonable fact is that there is an element of truth in both of these contentions. The great increase in facilities for international communication and travel has made emigration a common thing, and the law in practice, whatever it may be in letter, has recognized in varying ways the fact that the human individual can, does abjure his “contract” with the state where he has lived, and seek admission to one which for this reason and that he thinks likely to be more salubrious for the pursuit of what he regards as his happiness. For, after all is said, the fact remains that men stay here or go there in that pursuit. A crowd goes home when it begins to rain not because the crowd is getting wet, but because each individual of it, in his separate personal eachness, so to speak, has water running down his neck and desires to find a place where he can get dry. Waves of emigration represent countless individuals each of whom believes that elsewhere, or in some particular place, he can be more comfortable in the practices and activities which constitute his life by day and by night, and maybe find a broader and richer field in which to grow and raise his family. The offer of just this kind of opportunity has induced many hundreds of thousands of human beings from all parts of the earth to dissolve the bond, contractual or what you will, between themselves and the land of their birth or previous habitation, and come to these shores. We have invited them, and devised elaborate machinery by which to welcome them into our fellowship. Not only has the invitation been definitely expressed; we have opened wide gates in our bars, and placed premiums upon entrance therein. BASES OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP