Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/102

88 human race, so it is overspreading the earth with a rapidity far exceeding any other. With a partial exception in Canada, English is the language of the continent of America north of Mexico; and at the existing rate of increase there will be a hundred millions of people speaking English in the United States alone at the end of this century. In the West India islands we have given our language to a population collected from various parts of Africa, and by this circumstance alone they have been brought many centuries nearer to civilization than their countrymen in Africa, who may for ages grope about in the dark, destitute of any means of acquiring true religion and science. Their dialect is an uncouth perversion of English suited to the present crude state of their ideas, but their literature will be the literature of England, and their language will gradually be conformed to the same standard. More recently the English language has taken root in the continent of Africa itself, and a nation is being formed by means of it in the extensive territory belonging to the Cape out of a most curious mixture of different races. But the scene of its greatest triumphs will be in Asia. To the south a new continent is being peopled with the English race; to the north, an