literary prestige which England still exercises. But the real
question is: shall the English of Americans be good English or bad
English; shall a good tradition safeguard change and experiment,
or shall we have chaotic vulgarity like the Low Latin of the late
Roman Empire?

The truth is that our language is tradition, for it holds
tradition in solution like iron in wine. And here lie the secret
and the power of American, "Anglo-Saxon" domination.

What is to be done about it? Shall anything be done about it? The
Anglomaniac is helpless before the fact of language. The most he
can do is to attack, and uproot if he can, the American tradition.

There is nothing sacrosanct in this American tradition. Like all
traditions it is stiff, it will clasp, if we allow it, the future
in the dead hand of precedent. It can be used by the designing to
block progress. But as traditions go it is not conservative.
Radicalism, indeed, is its child. Political and religious
radicalism brought the Pilgrims to New England, the Quakers to
Pennsylvania; political and economic radicalism made the
Revolution against the will of American conservatives; political
and social radicalism made the Civil War inevitable and gave it
moral earnestness. Radicalism, whether you like it or not, is much
more American than what some people mean by "Americanism" to-day.
And its bitterest opponents in our times would quite certainly
have become Nova Scotian exiles if they had been alive and
likeminded in 1783.

Nor is this American tradition impeccable in the political ideas,