No. 22.
Mr. Bayard
to Mr. Lawton.
Washington, July 28, 1887.
Sir: Mr. Lee’s dispatch No. 253, of the 30th ultimo, relative to Mrs. Mundé’s application for a passport, has been received and considered.
It appears that Mr. Mundé, on naturalization in Massachusetts in 1854, renounced allegiance to the King of Saxony. He went in 1866 to Würzburg, Bavaria, and then to Stuttgart, Wurtemberg. Subsequently he went to Switzerland to reside where he married in 1874 the person who is now, as his widow, making application for a passport. Later he went to Goritz, Austria, where he died. Before his death, on May 21, 1885, Mr. Francis, then our minister at Vienna, gave Mr. Mundé a passport as an American citizen.
[Page 24]It is not necessary now to determine the effect on his acquired citizenship of Dr. Mundé’s long residence abroad, which was continued up to the time of his death. It is sufficient for the purpose of the present application to say that, assuming that Dr. Mundé always retained the animum revertendi, Mrs. Mundé, his widow, who has never been in the United States, does not, on the papers before the Department, show sufficient evidence of intention to come to and reside in the United States to warrant the Department in saying that she has retained the alleged American domicil of her late husband. This is merely a question of evidence, to be determined upon the proofs submitted. The intent to come to the United States must be bona fide and actual, with the purpose to perform the duties of American citizenship, and not simply for the purpose of evading responsibilities abroad without incurring any in this country. The only evidence in Mrs. Mundé’s application of an intent to come to the United States is her declaration that she expects to do so in fifteen years. In the absence of positive evidence as to her reason for fixing that time, the Department is not disposed to make any inferences adverse to the motives of the present application. It is, however, not improbable that by or before the expiration of that term of years questions might be raised as to the liability of the applicant’s son to certain burdens in the country of his birth, and of the prima facie domicil of his mother, where he has always lived, and where, as the evidence indicates, it is proposed that he shall remain until he reaches the age of twenty-one years, he being six years of age at the present time. This circumstance in the opinion of the Department, makes it especially desirable that more definite evidence should be furnished by the applicant in respect to her intentions.
As the evidences before the Department are not sufficient to warrant a final decision on Mrs. Mundé’s status, the Department does not intend, in approving your withholdment of a passport in the case as now presented, to prejudice any rights to which Mrs. Mundé may hereafter show herself to be entitled 5 all that is necessary at present to say is that the evidences now before the Department point to an Austrian rather than an American domicil.
I am, etc.,