Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/173

IV.] development and energy to which only a distant approach was made under the most favourable circumstances in ancient times. The conscious and reflective users of speech, the instructed and cultivated, the writers of their thoughts, have become everywhere a class powerful in numbers as well as dominant in influence. Education, no longer confined to the upper layer, more or less pervades the whole mass of the people. Books are in every one's hands, assimilating and establishing the written and spoken usages of all. That form of the common speech in each country which has enlisted in its support the best minds, the sweetest and most sonorous tongues, is ever gaining ground upon the others, supplanting their usages, and promising to become and to continue the true popular language.

In America, the influences we have now been considering wear a somewhat peculiar form. On the one hand, the educated class nowhere else embraces so large a portion of the community, or has so vast a collective force; on the other hand, and partly for this very reason, the highest and best-educated class have less power here than in the less democratic countries of the Old World: the low-toned party newspaper is too much the type of the prevailing literary influence by which the style of speech of our rising generation is moulding. A tendency to slang, to colloquial inelegancies, and even vulgarities, is the besetting sin against which we, as Americans, have especially to guard and to struggle. To attain that thorough democracy which is the best life and vigour of language, to keep our English speech vivid with the thought and feeling of a whole people, we should not bring down the tone and style of the highest, nor average those of all classes; we should rather lift up the lower to the level of the higher.

Our review of the causes which determine the respective part played by the different processes of linguistic growth, and the rate at which they severally act, is far from being exhaustive. To treat the subject with thoroughness would require a treatise. Parts of it are of extreme subtlety and difficulty. Our attention has been directed almost solely to external historical circumstances, those of which the effect