"To observers with an eye on the nation's burgeoning cities, the confluent problems of increasing economic dependency, intense wage competition from foreign workers, and progressively greater concentrations of both economic production and population, were seismic historical upheavals that threatened to erode the very pillars of republican government. The Jeffersonian republic of economically independent, politically virtuous producer-citizens appeared to be slipping from view, crowded off the historical stage by new, characteristically "European" forms of economic social and economic organization. As Americans' confidence in the great hopper of assimilation wavered, critics of the United States's liberal immigration and naturalization policies typically invoked two intertwined arguments for curbing the nation's traditional generosity. First, they argued that the disappearance in recent decades of vacant lands and the increasing concentration of industry and population had skewed two of the hopper's integral components: immigrants' ready access to individual economic proprietorship, and their immersion in American life and labor. The effect was to radically impair the capacity of American economic and political institutions to transform Europe's outcasts into patriotic republicans. Second, and most often, however, critics pointed to the poor quality of the raw material that the assimilationist hopper was tasked to digest: the fundamental moral natures of immigrants themselves. A leading contemporary chronicler of the Know-Nothing movement, Frederich Anspach, was representative in blending an account of changing economic organization and settlement patterns with a palpable distain for immigrants' moral constitutions. When the naturalization laws were first formed, Anspach explained, "we were an infant nation . ..with an immense territory . . ..It was an object of paramount importance at the time, to have our lands occupied, our solitudes peopled, our roads opened, and our cities built." Faced with such exigencies, policymakers sought to encourage immigration by permitting foreigners to acquire property and, most importantly, providing for easy access to American citizenship. If former circumstances warranted liberality, however, "[s]uch is not our condition now." In the new, post-agrarian republic, where "[m]uch of our territory is peopled, our wide domain is rapidly filling up, our coasts are protected, [and] our cities built," the time had come to "guard against the evils which do accompany the unparalleled influx of foreigners." In order to prevent hastily enfranchised foreigners from "convert[ing] this asylum . . .into a despotism of oppression," Anspach counseled the erection of substantial new barriers to United States citizenship."