Page:A Plea for the Queen's English.djvu/22

Rh 4. Now just so is it with our English lan- guage—our Queen's English. There was a day when it was as rough as the primitive inhabitants. Centuries have laboured at level- ling, hardening, widening it. For language wants all these processes, as well as roads do. In order to become a good highway for thought and speech, it must not have great prominent awkward points, over which the mind and the tongue may stumble ; its words must not be too weak to carry the weight of our thoughts, nor its limiting rules too narrow to admit of their extension. And it is by processes of this kind in the course of centuries, that our English tongue has been ever adapted more and more to our continually increasing wants. It has never been found too rough, too unsub- stantial, too limited, for the requirements of English thought. It has become for us, in our days, a level, firm, broad highway, over which all thought and all speech can travel smoothly and safely. Along it the lawyer and the parliamentary agent propel their heavy waggons, clogged with a thousand pieces of cumbrous antiquated machinery,—and no wonder, when they charge freightage, not by the weight of the load, combined with the distance, but by the number of impediments B 2