The first Congress recognised its constitutional obligation to provide a uniform law for national citizenship by allowing an alien who had resided two years within its jurisdiction and one year within any State to take an oath before any court of common-law record to support the Constitution and thereby become a citizen. Five years later, Congress feared that the warring powers of Europe would send undesirable aliens to the United States. "Coming from a quarter of the world so full of disorder and corruption," said a speaker in the House, "they might contaminate the purity and simplicity of the American character." A new naturalisation law was passed, requiring an alien to give three years' notice of his intention to change his allegiance--a kind of period of repentance. The required time of residence was then raised to five years for the nation and one for the State. During that time he must maintain a good moral character, must abjure allegiance to all other sovereigns, and must renounce all hereditary titles and orders of nobility. In this way one speaker said he hoped to shut out those refugees from the twenty thousand French nobility, who might choose to fly to the United States. Another expected to see an equally large number of the peerage arrive from Britain, as soon as the correct principles of government should take root there. Little alarm need have been felt about those members of the deposed nobility of France who did arrive. They were more concerned with getting daily bread than acquiring citizenship or retaining their titles. Prince, marquis and marquise, vicomte, and bishop, alike must keep body and soul together by turning wig-maker, baker, or milliner, until the madness of the French people should pass. By and by, the changes of fortune in France began to send over Constitutionalists, Thermidorians, Fructidorians, and the like, to plot and intrigue. "They kept their eyes fixed on France," said a French volunteer, who had returned to America to secure the pay due him since Revolutionary days, "to which all expected to return sooner or later and recommence what each called his _great work_, for there were exactly the same number of political systems as there were refugees." The French sympathisers in America mingled with these _émigrés_ and were more or less concerned with their plans. The press offered the opportunity to vent much of their spleen on Washington and to express their opinions of the "British United States Government," as they called it.