authority of law, has given way, in principle and practice, to the natural and fundamental right to transfer allegiance, and that every man should be allowed to exercise it with no other limitation than the public safety or interest requires. The sound and prevalent doctrine now is that a citizen or subject, having faithfully performed the past and present duties resulting from his relation to the sovereign power, may at any time release himself from the obligation of allegiance, freely quit the land of his birth or adoption, search through all the countries a home, and select anywhere that which offers him the finest prospect of happiness for himself and posterity. This right rests on as firm a basis and is similar in principle to the right which legitimates resistance to tyranny. Two elements, each equally important, enter into expatriation,--the one is emigration out of one’s native country, and the other is naturalization in the country adopted. All lexicographers and all jurists define naturalization in one way. In its popular etymological and legal sense, it signifies the act of adopting a foreigner and clothing him with all the privileges of a native citizen or subject. This naturalization cannot do under the Swiss contention; for the national allegiance of the Swiss cannot be thrown off and another substituted in its place without the assent of the sovereign holding the former. Naturalization in a foreign country should operate, from the time of its completion, as an extinguishment of the original citizenship; it should work absolute expatriation in law as it does in fact. A citizen who has in good faith abjured his country and become a subject of a foreign nation should to his native government be considered as denationalized; leaving it to the law of the land of his birth, whether or how he shall become repatriated. As forcibly expressed by a former Secretary of State at Washington: “The moment a foreigner becomes naturalized, his allegiance to his native country is severed forever. He experiences a new political birth,--a broad and impassable line separates him from his native country.”