the needs of the great majority of those who profess to speak it. I do
not refer to the half-civilized and altogether barbaric races who are
coming under its sway, but to the people we are breeding of our own
race--the barbarians of our streets, our suburban "white niggers," with
a thousand a year and the conceit of Imperial destinies. They live in
our mother-tongue as some half-civilized invaders might live in a
gigantic and splendidly equipped palace. They misuse this, they waste
that, they leave whole corridors and wings unexplored, to fall into
disuse and decay. I doubt if the ordinary member of the prosperous
classes in England has much more than a third of the English language
in use, and more than a half in knowledge, and as we go down the social
scale we may come at last to strata having but a tenth part of our full
vocabulary, and much of that blurred and vaguely understood. The speech
of the Colonist is even poorer than the speech of the home-staying
English. In America, just as in Great Britain and her Colonies, there
is the same limitation and the same disuse. Partly, of course, this is
due to the pettiness of our thought and experience, and so far it can
only be remedied by a general intellectual amplification; but partly it
is due to the general ignorance of English prevailing throughout the
world. It is atrociously taught, and taught by ignorant men. It is
atrociously and meanly written. So far as this second cause of sheer
ignorance goes, the gaps in knowledge are continually resulting in
slang and the addition of needless neologisms to the language. People
come upon ideas that they know no English to express, and strike out
the new phrase in a fine burst of ignorant discovery. There are
Americans in particular who are amazingly apt at this sort of thing.
They take an enormous pride in the jargon they are perpetually
increasing--they boast of it, they give exhibition performances in it,
they seem to regard it as the culminating flower of their continental
Republic--as though the Old World had never heard of shoddy. But,