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Most members of the Crown Loyalist Party considered that completely impractical. The variations in local and regional custom when it came to citizenship were simply too great. Trying to come up with any standard criteria applied across the board nationally would tie up the parliament for years.

Instead, as with the established church, most Crown Loyalists felt that each province needed to establish its own criteria for citizenship. Some of them even pointed out that that had been the stance originally taken by the United States the up-timers came from.

(To which Mike Stearns responded bluntly and crudely: "Yup, we sure did, which goes to prove Americans can fuck up like the best of 'em. As a result of which, we saddled ourselves with slavery, property qualifications to vote—you name the stupid limitation on citizenship, we did it—and it took Andy Jackson and a civil war to get rid of all that crap.")

Within that broad camp, a division existed. The moderate wing of the Crown Loyalists, with Hesse-Kassel again in the lead, advocated that citizenship criteria should be established by the provincial governments.

That was simple enough, they argued. In private, Stearns had told them that if his back was to the wall, he'd accept that compromise also.

But most of the Crown Loyalists thought that policy would be disastrous, and for two reasons.

First, they pointed out—correctly enough—that Hesse-Kassel's position amounted to locking the barn after the horse got out. There being as yet no established constitution for the USE, the recent election that had produced the existing provincial governments had willy-nilly been held under the terms dictated by the prime minister in power, Mike Stearns. He had simply decreed that all adult permanent residents were citizens and thus could vote.

To be sure, in many of the provinces still dominated by traditional elites there had been plenty of voter intimidation and vote fraud. Still, from the viewpoint of most Crown Loyalists, the result was hopelessly tainted. Allowing the provincial governments elected under Stearns' dictatorial fiat to turn around and decide citizenship was preposterous. As one prominent Crown Loyalist put it, "You might as well allow a band of robbers to vote on whether their loot is legal."

Abstractly, their position held quite a bit of merit. But Wilhelm V and Amalie Elizabeth thought that was pure folly. In the real world, sensible people—for sure, sensible rulers—had to accept that certain realities, no matter how unpleasant, were too well-established to try to overturn.

Unfortunately, their practical and moderate position was not shared by most of their party. The majority of Crown Loyalists insisted that the decision on who was and who wasn't a citizen had to be made in each province by that province's traditional and established authorities, not the newly elected, bastard legislatures.

Looked at from one angle, this stance was more than a bit absurd. After all, the Crown Loyalists held state power in the USE because they'd won a majority of the seats in the existing parliament, be that parliament ever so distorted and basely-born.

But that was only true nationally. The majority of the Crown Loyalists were adamant that "proper" citizenship criteria had to be established in every province as well. Left to their own devices, Magdeburg province and the State of Thuringia-Franconia would implement the Fourth of July Party's definition of citizenship. That would give those two very prominent provinces—the SoTF was already the USE's most populous province—even more sway in national affairs. That would be inevitable, since the voter rolls of most other provinces would drop drastically after the provincial elites reestablished traditional citizenship criteria.

Without realizing it, the down-time Crown Loyalists were being sucked into the same quicksand that had trapped the slave-owners in the early up-time United States. The free states—or full-citizenship