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172 took care that each rising generation should not fall behind its predecessor in learning. The basis, too, of equality of rights and privileges on which they founded their society added a powerful influence in favour of equality of speech. As a natural and unavoidable consequence, then, of these determining conditions, and not by reason of any virtue for which we are to take credit to ourselves, the general language of America, through all sections of the country and all orders of the population, became far more nearly homogeneous, and accordant with the correct standard of English speech, than is the average language of England. And the same influences which made it so have tended to keep it so: the democratic character of our institutions, and the almost universality of instruction among us, have done much to maintain throughout our community an approximate uniformity of idiom. There was doubtless never a country before, where, down to the very humblest classes of the people, so many learned to read and spell out of the same school-books, heard the same speakers, from platform, desk, and pulpit, and read the same books and papers; where there was such a surging to and fro of the population, such a mixture and intimate intercourse of all ranks and of all regions. In short, every form of communication is more active and more far-reaching with us than ever elsewhere; every assimilating influence has had unequalled freedom and range of action. Hence, there was also never a case in which so nearly the same language was spoken throughout the whole mass of so vast a population as is the English now in America. Modern civilization, with the great states it creates, and the wide and active intercourse among men to which it prompts and for which it affords the needed facilities, is able to establish upon unoccupied soil, and then to maintain there, community upon a scale of grandeur to which ancient times could afford no parallel.

Nor have we failed to keep nearly even pace with our British relations in the slow progressive development of the common tongue: our close connection with the mother-country, the community of culture which we have kept up with her, our acknowledgment of her superior authority in