They did not have the vast array of benefits and services of an Indian Bureau to administer their affairs for them. If they had had such parasitic agency to tell them what to do they would never have become citizens in the full sense of the word any more than the Indians have. No. the foreign born learned by experience and by hardwon education just what was involved in citizenship. Not having a bureaucracy to impede their progress they generally emerged during individual lifetimes from their apprenticeship into the status of full citizens of the same standing as any other American. But can we see any possibility of an American Indian learning to become a full citizen in this way during his lifetime?
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foreign born