Mr. Olney to Mr. Townsend.
Washington, October 31, 1895.
Sir: Your No. 163, of the 14th instant, in relation to the application for a renewed passport made by Salomon Faden, has been received.
Mr. Faden’s prior application, upon which a renewal of a previous passport granted by this Department was obtained by him at your legation October 2, 1893, having contained a positive declaration to return to the United States within two years to perform the duties of citizenship, it would require now very conclusive proof of his determination to so return in order to issue him a third passport. The facts you state, however, conspicuously negative any such purpose of return, and Mr. Faden’s declaration to you that, if the business he has established in his native town “does not go, he may try his luck in America,” is entirely too indefinite to be considered.
For some years the Department has in special cases, upon the repeated application for renewal of passports, directed that the applicant be warned that the declaration of intention to return to the United States is not an empty phrase, and that in the case of a further renewal being sought withholdment of a passport would probably follow. You do not state whether any such warning was given to Mr. Faden, but his case does not seem sufficiently meritorious to invite the Department to stretch its custom in this regard. Both on the presumption and the facts he may be deemed to have voluntarily repatriated himself, and if he has not actually resumed Austrian allegiance in conformity with the laws of that country, he has at least voluntarily abandoned practical allegiance to the Government of his acquired nationality to such an extent as to absolve it in return from the duty of protecting him while he maintains indefinite and apparently permanent domicile in the land of his birth.
I am, etc.,