Another obstruction goes to the question of our treatment of the foreign-born laborer in industry--especially if he bear what we choose to regard as a “queer” name, difficult for us to spell or pronounce. The courts have, properly, no doubt, no patience with assumed names--particularly in a case where the alien cannot remember the name under which he entered the country. But it is a very common practice, in concerns employing a large number of immigrants, for the minor officials of the company, superintendents and foremen, to attach a name to a job, and insist upon calling the man who occupies it, “Mike Murphy,” or what not else, because that was the name of the first incumbent, and it is easier to pronounce than “Bahaoud,” “Behrensmayer,” or “Przybylski.” This, and the even more common practice of calling a man by a number, rather than a name, results in a vast deal of confusion, in a substantial discouragement of self-respect, and in the ultimate establishment of the neighborhood identity of a polysyllabic Greek or Armenian, perhaps, with a fine old Irish name. This will not do in the naturalization court. The petitioner must come in under at least the same name that he bore when he entered the country, and there must be no suspicion as to its not being his own. But he does not have to keep that name. It is prescribed as lawful for the court in its discretion, “at the time and as a part of the naturalization of any aliens, ... upon the petition of such alien, to make a decree changing the name of said alien.” The fact of which the court must be convinced is that the petitioner is not attempting to conceal his real identity for the purpose of escaping payment of just debts or punishment for crime. Many aliens do thus change their names, and there have been cases in which the judge virtually compelled them to do so. A naturalization judge said to the writer: I have heard of a high-handed old judge, somewhere in the Northwest, who was in the habit of “suggesting” to every alien who came before him with a complicated mouthful of name that he change it to “Abraham Lincoln,” “Benjamin Franklin,” “George Washington,” or “Grover Cleveland.” No doubt you could find many a Pole or Swede naturalized as “Thomas Jefferson” or “Alexander Hamilton,” whose father, living in the same town, was known as “Konrad Kowalewski,” or “Ole Johanssen.”