don of the latter, it being the business of each to obey the law, the law they are both subject to.

These few principles, upon which American English can be and should be defended and is to be judged, will lead us, it is to be hoped, to the conclusion that an independence born of a scholarly and broad-minded view of the case should be cultivated by every patriotic and thoughtful man and woman in these United States.

Neither Anglophobia nor Anglomania need influence us here, but the facts should be followed and our position reasoned out. And in conclusion we may formulate explicitly what has been, all through our argument, an implicit assumption; namely, good English has no meaning except in relation to the country in which it is spoken. There is no such thing as good English in the abstract; in England the English heard in the mouths of the most cultivated people, or written by the most reputable makers of literature, is the norm and standard. In America exactly the same holds true. To assume that we must look to London for our model is to acknowledge that the English speech has degenerated as

wielded by the English colonists and their descendants. And since degeneration of speech can only come from degeneration of character, the inference is that the English stock is in a bad way in these parts. But the quality of the original settlers, the stuff that they showed to be in them in the troublous colonial and revolutionary days and in later days of war and peace, together with our present proud position among the nations of civilization, suffice to answer such a preposterous notion. American English is to-day a distinct variation of British English, and for the same reason that French, Italian, Spanish, and the other Romance tongues are variants of the mother Latin tongue. Dialectical differentiations always arise where a homogeneous language sends out branches to other parts of the earth; and, logically, it is as absurd to fault or depreciate the speech of the United States for its divergences from British uses as it would be to take exception to the language of Leopardi, Hugo, and Valera, because it is not Ciceronian Latin. The only difference is that in the case of Romance peoples a much longer time has elapsed since they split off from

Rome, and so the changes are more striking. In the case of American English, too, the centripetal forces of modern social life will forbid ours ever becoming a distinct tongue. But room there will always be for individual freedom and national independence in this matter of speech, and that American who fears to exercise these democratic privileges is not only laying himself open to the charge of ignorance: he is forfeiting his birthright as well.