So far as anything in the law goes to prevent, the immigrant can make his way immediately from the vessel that brings him, after the immigration authorities have admitted him to these shores, or across the Canadian or the Mexican border, to the clerk’s office in “any court having a clerk, a seal, and jurisdiction over actions at law or equity, or law and equity, without limit as to amount,” and within an hour of arrival file his declaration of intention to become an American citizen. Of course, he doesn’t do that--unless in very rare instances. The available statistics go to show that, in the average case, he waits nearly seven (6.8) years.[69] But whenever he files it, it will be good (unless some blunder of the clerk, or some technical defect which the clerk overlooks, makes it invalid from the outset) for seven years. It cannot be made the basis of a petition for citizenship until two years after its date, and there must have been, before or after its date, at least three years’ additional residence in the United States to make up the required five years, and the last year of the five must have been passed “continuously” within the state or territory in which the final petition is filed. Mr. Alien would better be very careful that his declaration is properly made out, on the identical printed form furnished by the Bureau of Naturalization; he must file it in the office of the clerk, and not deliver it to him at his house or on the street corner. He may not hear anything about this at the time; but seven years afterward he may be brought up standing by the fact that it is invalid because of just such a defect. In the case _in re_ Brefo (217 Fed., 131-134) it was held, in 1914, that a declaration otherwise correct, but in typewriting, not on “the form furnished for that purpose by the government,” was a “legal nullity.” Were such an enormity permitted, the court said, there would be “an end to uniformity”; government control and supervision could not exist! And in the case _in re_ Langtry (31 Fed., 879), as long ago as 1887 the court declared that the clerk had no authority to take acknowledgment of declaration of intention at the home of an alien. Numerous other cases in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida, have settled the fact that the clerk’s office, or open court, is the only place where a valid declaration can be filed. If the clerk is without the proper blank forms, because he neglects to keep himself supplied, or because the Naturalization Bureau at Washington fails to heed his request for them, there is nothing for the would-be declarant to do but go home--perhaps many, or in some cases as much as two hundred and fifty miles--and subsequently try again.