political and social habits, his moral ideas, his literature, and
his language. This does not make him a "slave to England," as our
most recent propagandists would have it; it does not put him in
England's debt. We owe no debt to England. Great Britain, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and ourselves are deeply in
debt to our intellectual, our spiritual, our aesthetic ancestors
who were the molders of English history and English thought, the
interpreters of English emotion, the masters of the developing
English _mores_ that became our _mores_, and have since continued
evolution with a difference. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and
Milton, Wycliffe, Bunyan, Fox, and Wesley, Elizabeth, Cromwell, and
the great Whigs, these made the only tradition that can be called
Anglo-Saxon, and if we have an American tradition, as we assuredly
have, here are its roots. This is our "Anglo-Saxon domination."

But if the roots of this tradition are English, its trunk is
thoroughly American, seasoned and developed through two centuries
of specifically American history. As we know it to-day it is no
longer "Anglo-Saxon," it is as American as our cities, our soil,
our accent upon English. If we are going to discuss "domination"
let us be accurate and speak of the domination of American
tradition. It is against the American tradition that the new
Anglomaniac actually protests.

Dominating this American tradition is, dominating, almost
tyrannical, for one reason only, but that a strong one, a fact not
a convention, a factor, not a mere influence--dominating because
of the English language.

In our century language has become once again as powerful as in