n admitting foreigners to our
shores in such enormous quantities each year that we have not been able
at all adequately to assimilate them, nor have we used at all a
sufficiently wise discrimination in the admission of desirables or
undesirables.

We have received, or we have allowed to be dumped upon our shores, great
numbers of the latter whom we should know would inevitably become
dependents, as well as great numbers of criminals. The result has been
that they have been costing certain localities millions of dollars every
year. But entirely aside from the latter, the last two or three years
have brought home to us as never before the fact that those who come to
our shores must come with the avowed and the settled purpose of becoming
real American citizens, giving full and absolute allegiance to the
institutions, the laws, the government of the land of their adoption.

If any other government is not able so to manage as to make it more
desirable for its subjects to remain in the land of their birth, rather
than to seek homes in the land with institutions more to their liking,
or with advantages more conducive to their welfare, that government then
should not expect to retain, even in the slightest degree, the
allegiance of such former subjects. A hyphenated citizenship may become
as dangerous to a republic as a cancer is in the human body. A country
with over a hundred hyphens cannot fulfil its highest destiny.

We, as a nation, have been rudely shaken from our long dream of almost
inevitable national security. We have been brought finally, and although
as a nation we have no desire for conquest or empire, and no desire for
military glory, and therefore no need of any great army or navy for
offensive purposes, we have been brought finally to realise that we do,
nevertheless, stand in need of a national strengthening of our arm of
defence. A land of a hundred million people, where one could travel many
times for a sixmonth and never see the sign of a soldier, is brought,
though reluctantly, to face a new state of affairs; but one,
nevertheless, that must be faced--calmly faced and wisely acted upon.
And while it is true that as a nation we have always had the tradition
of non-militarism, it is not true that we have had the tradition of
military or of naval impotence or weakness.

Preparedness, therefore, has assumed a position of tremendous
importance, in individual thought, in public discussion, and almost
univers