The severity of our laws in the matter of counterfeiting is well known, but they have no terrors whatsoever for the gangs of Italian counterfeiters who are giving the Secret Service Department more trouble than it has ever had with native criminals of this order. The internal revenue laws are very thorough, and the execution of them is far-reaching and systematic, in fact the administration of the federal internal revenue system has long been a boast with this country, and so well did it do its work that now and then a lone moonshiner escaped detection, and that was all. Since the influx of foreign masses into the country, the troubles of the Department have grown. In the larger cities to-day the Bohemian cigar makers and dealers are building up intricate systems of cigar making and selling without paying the government its due. Buying direct from farmers and planters, failing to account for the stock bought, making without recording the product, selling it clandestinely to refill boxes,—those are some of the details of the operations. The extent of the frauds is growing every day, just as rapidly as the number of aliens who will engage in such practices increases. Of the naturalization frauds much has been written and said, and I have given a number of instances in earlier chapters which show how the Italians particularly operate with fraudulent naturalization papers, not only using them to vote with in this country, and so reap the harvest of political heelers,—meanwhile having any true idea of citizenship they might get hopelessly abased,—but farming them out to serve as cloaks for passing in as citizens several of their countrymen each year. The worst feature of this is that politically unscrupulous men in all of the large cities of the country do not hesitate to use their influence to obtain fraudulent naturalization papers for their alien followers, in fact employ the papers to buy the friendship of the aliens or to reward services already rendered. There are election districts in the Italian quarter of New York where not more than one-half of the registered foreign-born voters are legally entitled to ballot. The remedy for this feature of alien legislation and evasion is to change, by Federal act, the system of examining aliens, and, without making it more difficult for a man to become naturalized rightfully, make the research into his record and attainments so far-reaching that even perjury will not save him; for perjury, as a crime, rests lightly on the average alien’s conscience. The evasions of the contract-labor law and of the exclusion-of-diseased-immigrants law have been many times mentioned in these pages, and constitute a problem which will not be solved by any legislation making the examination at our ports any more strict.