Gazette Of The United States And Daily Evening Advertiser

CONGRESS.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

Tuesday, December 30.

The instalment bill was read a third time and passed.

The amendments to the militia bill made by the committee of conference, were read and agreed to.

In committee of the whole, on the naturalization bill, Mr. Cobb in the chair.

Mr. Hillhouse moved to insert an amendment to the clause before the committee, that if any citizen of the United States, at any time the state, should become a citizen or subject of any other state or country, he should not be again admitted as American citizen.

This amendment gave rise to a debate.

Mr. Baldwin expressed the strongest disapprobation of the idea of expatriating all those of our citizens who may have become subjects or citizens of another country. Many of them had been made citizens without any solicitation of their own, and merely as a mark of esteem from the government under which they lived. They had no design whatever of renouncing their country. Yet the amendment declares them incapable of returning to their former situation.

Mr. Murray hoped the amendment would succeed, and that any citizen of the United States, who, when out of the United States, elected to be a subject of any foreign power, should not again be permitted to the rights of complete citizenship nor did he think it necessary to decide the question which had resulted from the ingenious arguments of his friend from Massachusetts (Mr. Dexter)—whether a man can expatriate himself, without the express consent of the community, or nation, of which he is a citizen or subject: was enough for us to say, that, any man who does expatriate himself from the United States, shall not again become a citizen. He could not agree with the gentleman of Massachusetts, in the position, that a man cannot expatriate without the consent of his country:

The practice of this country is a direct confutation of this doctrine; and it must be admitted, either that this country has trampled on the most solemn of social and national rights by its practice or that a man may leave his country and take on him the obligations of a new allegiance to this country. It seemed to him a position as conformable to sound morals, as to public truth, that what a magistrate right infer; another man, or society could rightfully accept. He would leave, that this country had a right to naturalize foreigners, because she has naturalized them; and that this country, by its laws, having accepted the allegiance of an alien, the alien had a right to offer that allegiance : The very proviso to naturalize an alien, without enquiry as to the consent of his own country having been previously obtained, seems to be predicated on the principle for which he contended—that a man has the right to expatriate himself without leave obtained :: If he has not; all our laws of this sort. by which we convert an alien into a citizen completely, must be acknowledged to be a violation of the rights of nations. " How far a man after having once naturalized at a period of life when his reason enabled him to enter into a solemn oath of allegiance,—and after he expressly entered into it, has a right, without the consent of the society, to quit that society, might be another question. After a citizen throws off his allegiance to this country, by leaving it and entering into a new obligation to some other nation, though he may have a right to do,— he has no right to return to his allegiance here, without the consent of this society ; and it is not a question of right, but of policy, how far we shall re-admit him to citizenship.::When he said that the right of dissolving allegiance must be admitted, both to give exercise to a right, and to give consistency to our principles and practice, he did not mean that a citizen could willfully off his allegiance in this country; but that he must complete the act of dissolution in some other country; Such principle would belong to the theory of the dissolution, rather than the formation of a civil society; hence appeared to him the strange solecism of a law of Virginia which provides for the throwing off allegiance within the community. The consequences of such a principle are not only destructive to the very form and body of civil society, but are unnatural. They present a citizen belonging to no civil society on earth ; for, in the intermediate state in which he stands. between the allegiance and country he has just disowned and the allegiance and country to which he is going bound to pledge himself, he is in a solitary state of nature, which is an unnatural state, for a man with every faculty and quality in him as a moral agent, surrounded with essential relations, and, of course incapacity to discharge duties of a society immense He wished this government, while it expressly adopted the right of naturalizing aliens, to do and to say nothing that involved a contradiction between its principles and practice. If it accepts the allegiance of an alien, it presupposes but the alien has the right to offer his allegiance; and one clause of it expressly requires of the alien to renunciation of his former allegiance ca is certainly proper: In doing, the bill admits, unequivocally, the right of subjects and citizens to expatriate. The British government, by a want of conformity between their first principles, as laid down in their law books, and the practice of Parliament, have shown us a singular mixture of old principles which the nation has out-grown. It is a maxim with them that allegiance can not be dissolved by any change of time or place, nor by the oath of a subject to any foreign power: Yet they naturalize by act of Parliament: They accept what they declare by their theory of civil law can not rightfully offered; nay for one century the throne of England has presented monarchs who were foreigners: William III. was a prince, but he was subject too of a foreign power; and George the first was a member of the Germanic body. There is little danger that citizens, who are worthy of being so, will throw off their allegiance from the United States. The amendment which prohibits their re-admission to a participation of all the rights of citizenship, will be a sufficient penalty, if any be necessary. Though they may have a right to expatriate themselves, there can not be inferred a right of returning; for every body politic must have the right of saying upon what terms they will accept any addition of aliens to their numbers—and the ex-patriated man no longer belonging to this society, and being an alien, the government may choose whether he ever shall enjoy its privileges again.
The amendment was negatived. The committee rose; the chairman reported progress, and the House adjourned.