doubt, that no oath nor material interest can change, and that is never
naturalized. We see this experiment in America more than anywhere else,
because here meet more different races than anywhere else with the
serious intention of changing their nationality. And we have a notion
that there is something in our atmosphere, or opportunities, or our
government, that makes this change more natural and reasonable than it
has been anywhere else in history. It is always a surprise to us when a
born citizen of the United States changes his allegiance, but it seems a
thing of course that a person of any other country should, by an oath,
become a good American, and we expect that the act will work a sudden
change in him equal to that wrought in a man by what used to be called a
conviction of sin. We expect that he will not only come into our family,
but that he will at once assume all its traditions and dislikes, that
whatever may have been his institutions or his race quarrels, the moving
influence of his life hereafter will be the "Spirit of '76."

What is this naturalization, however, but a sort of parable of human
life? Are we not always trying to adjust ourselves to new relations, to
get naturalized into a new family? Does one ever do it entirely? And how
much of the lonesomeness of life comes from the failure to do it! It is a
tremendous experiment, we all admit, to separate a person from his race,
from his country, from his climate, and the habits of his part of the
country, by marriage; it is only an experiment differing in degree to
introduce him by marriage into a new circle of kinsfolk. Is he ever
anything but a sort of tolerated, criticised, or admired alien? Does the
time ever come when the distinction ceases between his family and hers?
They say love is stronger than death. It may also be stronger than
family--while it lasts; but was there ever a woman yet whose most
ineradicable feeling was not the sentiment of family and blood, a sort of
base-line in life upon which trouble and disaster always throw her back?
Does she ever lose the instinct of it? We used to say in jest that a
patriotic man was always willing to sacrifice his wife's relations in
war; but his wife took a different view of it; and when it becomes a
question of office, is it not the wife's relations who get them? To be
sure, Ruth said, thy people shall be my people, and where thou goest I
will go, and all that, and this beautiful sentiment has touched