the Roman Empire--and its effects, thanks to printing and easy
transportation, are far more quickly attained. Hordes from all
over Europe have swarmed into the domain of English. They have
come to a country where the new language was indispensable. They
have learned it, or their children have learned it. English has
become their means of communication with their neighbors, with
business, with the state. Sooner or later even the news of Europe
has come to them through English, and sometimes unwillingly, but
more often unconsciously, they have come under the American, the
real "Anglo-Saxon" domination.

For a language, of course, is more than words. It is a body of
literature, it is a method of thinking, it is a definition of
emotions, it is the exponent and the symbol of a civilization. You
cannot adopt English without adapting yourself in some measure to
the English, or the Anglo-American tradition. You cannot adopt
English political words, English literary words, English religious
words, the terms of sport or ethics, without in some measure
remaking your mind on a new model. If you fail or refuse, your
child will not. He is forcibly made an American, in ideas at
least, and chiefly by language.

I submit that it is impossible for an alien _thoroughly_ to absorb and
understand Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech or Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter"
without working a slight but perceptible transformation in the brain,
without making himself an heir of a measure of English tradition. And
the impact of English as a spoken tongue, and the influence of its
literature as the only read literature, are great beyond ordinary
conception. Communities where a foreign language is read or spoken
only delay the process, they cannot stop it.