N.6!1.I./BALIZED ALIENS AND OTHERS.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR.")
Sig,—Whither is this alien-hunt leading us ? At one moment.the Prime Minister, speaking the saner mind of the country, diamieses it as a side-issue. At another, touched up by the Coalition Whip, and with a shrew.d eye on every electioneering prejudice that can be made to yield a juicy extract of votes, he not only joins in, but leads, the hue-and-cry. We are to make, it would appear, a clean sweep of the alien element which has always fed and invigorated British life. No naturalized British subject henceforward is to be allowed to vote, or to enter Parliament, or to put himself forward as a candidate for the Civil Service, or to be employed in any Government office. Many of these disabilities, it is seriously sing- seated, are to extend even to the sons of naturalized aliens. In addition, all interned subjects of enemy lands are ID be re- patriated; a demand is already being raised for the wholesale cancellation of naturalization certificates; the Attorney-General has committed himself to the monstrous and palpably unjustifiable statement that eighteen out of every twenty Germans who have settled here in the last two decades have been spies; one at least of the rumps of Parties that are contending at this election seems to have no other slogan but "Britain for the British" and " Out with the alien"; and we shall soon be nearing the point when everybody net British-borh is forbidden to reside here, or to engage in trade here, or to claim any right whatever to be tolerated in our midst I need not say that this campaign of proscription outs comer pletely across our whole past, must eventually be fetal te our position as the centre of international trade and finance, and can only impoverish the national life by cutting us off from new ideas and the educational influence of foreign personalities and points of view. But what I would especially emphasize is not so much the harm we are doing ourselves as the pettiness and in- justice of the treatment we are meting out to those whom we have admitted to British citizenship by act of naturalization. Is there no public man with backbone enough to tell the country the truth about the British subjects of enemy origin—that they came here, just as hundreds of thousands of Britons go abroad, not to ant as spies, but to better their fortunes, to seek adventure, to sample life; that they stayed here and settled down here because they found the social and business and political atmosphere con- genial to them; that we extended to them the privilege of British citizenship by means of a solemn eovenant which we cannot treat as a scrap of paper; that if a few of them—ten or a dozen at the outside—have proved unworthy of the trust we showed them, the overwhelming majority have shown themselves absolutely loyal to the country of their adoption; that many of them have ren- dered the Allied cause distinguished services in the war; and, that many more have paid the price of their devotion in the death of dearly loved sons? Having made our bargain with them, let us stick to it. Its risks have been infinitesimal and entirely within our competence to handle; its advantages have been immense; sad the contrast between the liberal and statesmanlike way in which the United States Government has rallied to itself the German- American community, and our own distrustful, Titus Oates attitude, is not one that an Englishman can look upon with any
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