[Untitled]

My Lord: By your lordship’s dispatch of the 16th instant I am directed to report the disabilities to which aliens residing in the Hanse towns are subjected by the local laws. I have accordingly the honor to state as follows:

The laws of Lubeck, Bremen, and Hamburg prohibit aliens from exercising the ordinary rights of citizenship except as undermentioned. They cannot hold any office under the State, nor can they acquire lands or houses in their own names within the territories of the state. Those privileges are reserved to citizens of the state, and to the subjects of the other states of the North German Confederation, who are on the same footing as Hanseatic citizens. But a foreigner can easily purchase land in the name of a citizen as his trustee, and this is not infrequently done.

At Lubeck and at Bremen aliens are still restricted from carrying on trades unless they have first acquired the rights of citizenship. The Lubeck law of the 20th of November, 1866, and the Bremen law of 15th February, 1861, had for their object the abolition of guilds, and facilitated the admission of foreigners as citizens at less expense than heretofore. But the condition of citizenship was not removed by those laws.

At Hamburg, however, aliens are no longer under any disabilities in respect of the exercise of trades. A law issued on the 7th of November, 1864, declares that trades and industrial occupations may be carried on by foreigners not subjects of the state; and it also reduces the cost of obtaining citizenship by those aliens who desire it. Another law, dated the 30th of December, 1867, abolished the exclusive privilege of entering goods in transit, formerly reserved to Hamburg citizens. The alien merchant is, therefore, in as favorable a position as the citizen merchant in any line of business which he may think proper to enter.

There are residing at Hamburg a considerable number of persons who claim the rights of British subjects on account of their birth or descent, but who are Hamburg subjects by having acquired citizenship or by being the children of citizens, or by having been born within the territory of the state. Such persons assert a double nationality, and appear in the character of a British subject or of a Hamburg citizen, as it suits their purpose. Ought they not rather to lose their British nationality so long as they are the voluntary citizens of a foreign state?

I have, &c.,

JOHN WARD.

The Right Hon. Lord Stanley,
&c., &c., &c.