This amazing paragraph is placed directly after the sections on representative government; it is so important that it comes before the items on trial by jury, taxation, and trade. It is a critical factor in the history of America; if we understand it, we can go forward to understand our situation today. The other complaints point toward our systems of law, our militia, our constant rebellion against taxes, our mild appreciation of civil duties, our unswerving insistence upon the act of choosing representatives; all these are details; but this unique item indicates how the nation was to be built and what its basic social, economic, and psychological factors were to be. This brief paragraph condemns the Crown for obstructing the two processes by which America was made: Immigration Pioneering With absolute clairvoyance the Declaration sets Naturalization, which means political equality, in between the two other factors. Naturalization is the formal recognition of the deep underlying truth, the new thing in the new world, that one could _become_ what one willed and worked to become--one could, regardless of birth or race or creed, _become an American_. So long as the colonies were held by the Crown, the process of populating the country by immigration was checked. The Colonists had no "dream" of a great American people combining racial bloods and the habits of all the European nations. They wanted only to secure their prosperity by growing; they constantly were sending agents to Westphalia and the Palatinate to induce good Germans to come to America, one colony competing with another, issuing pamphlets in Platt-Deutsch, promising not Utopia with rivers of milk and honey, not a dream, but something grander and greater--citizenship, equality under the law, and land. Across this traffic the King and his ministers threw the dam of Royal Prerogative; they meant to keep the colonies, and they knew they could not keep them if men from many lands came in as citizens; and they meant to keep the virgin lands from the Appalachians to the Mississippi--or as much of it as they could take from the Spaniards and the French. So as far back as 1763, the Crown took over _all_ title to the 250,000 square miles of land which are now Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and Minnesota, the best land lying beyond the Alleghenies. Into this territory no man could enter; none could settle; no squatters' right was recognized; no common law ran. Suddenly the natural activity of America, uninterrupted since 1620, stopped. The right of Americans to move westward and to take land, the right of non-Americans to become Americans, both were denied. The outcry from the highlands and the forest clearing was loud; presently the seaboard saw that America was one country, its true prosperity lay within its own borders, not across the ocean. And to make the unity clear, the Crown which had taken the land, now took the sea; the trade of the Colonies was