The organization had a large membership among Germans in America; it has been estimated that there were three million members, who constituted a great majority of the adult German-American population. It received a Federal charter in 1907. The Alliance, to quote Professor John William Scholl, of the University of Michigan, (in the New York _Times_ of March 2, 1918), "strives to awaken a sense of unity among the people of German origin in America; to 'centralize' their powers for the 'energetic defense of such justified wishes and interests' as are not contrary to the rights and duties of good citizens; to defend its class against 'nativistic encroachments'; to 'foster and assure good, friendly relations of America to the old German fatherland.' Such are its declared objects. "All petty quibbling aside, this programme can mean nothing else than the maintenance of a Germanized body of citizens among us, conscious of their separateness, resistant to all forces of absorption. It is mere camouflage to state in a later paragraph that this body does not intend to found a 'State within the State,' but merely sees in this centralization the 'best means of attaining and maintaining the aims' set forth above. "All existing societies of Germans are called upon as 'organized representatives of Deutschtum' to make it a point of honor to form a national alliance, to foster formation of new societies in all States of the Union, so that the whole mass of Germans in America can be used as a unit for political action. This league pledges itself 'with all legal means at hand unswervingly and at all times to enter the lists for the maintenance and propagation of its principles for their vigorous defense wherever and whenever in danger.'" Professor Scholl, himself a teacher of German, continues: "A little attention to the context of the sentences quoted shows that these Germans demand the privilege of coming to America, getting citizenship on the easiest terms possible, while maintaining intact their alien speech, alien customs, and alien loyalties. That is 'assimilation,' the granting of equal political rights and commercial opportunities, without exacting any alteration in modes of life or 'Sittlichkeit.' 'Absorption' means Americanization, a fusing with the whole mass of American life, an adoption of the language and ideals of the country, a spiritual rebirth into Anglo-Saxon civilization, and this has great terrors for the members of a German alliance.