NATIONALITY AND RACE DISTINCTIONS
While the English language makes Americans of all foreigners, it does not, of course, obliterate race distinctions as long as races continue to exist as such. Persons of alien races, nevertheless, when born in this country and reared under native influences, will become "American" in a truer sense than foreigners belonging to the Caucasian race coming here at maturity. I dare say Frederick Douglass was truly more of an American, in all this word implies, than any foreigner who ever came to live here; and so are all the better classes of native-born negroes, in a certain sense, more truly American, this indescribable something which constitutes a nation, than any aliens whosoever.
A gentleman once told me that, travelling on a steamboat on one of the New England rivers, he had been inadvertently listening to a conversation carried on behind him, between what seemed to be two New England farmers. On rising from his seat, he saw that one of the men was a Chinaman, dressed like the other and conversing precisely as he did.
Seeing an acquaintance, he pointed out the Chinaman and asked if he knew who he was.
"That's Jimmy O'Connor; he's from So-and-so."
"I mean the Chinaman."
"Yes, the Chinaman; that's him. You know he was picked up at sea, when still a baby, by a New Bedford whaler, and was brought up in the captain's family, who adopted him. He's as good a farmer and as true an American as you can find anywhere."
These studies are meant to be purely objective, and have no concern with politics or policies, regarding undesirable immigration, or issues of a similar nature. But language is nationality, and nationality language, always, in the first instance; and the purer a language is spoken, the truer, purer, and better such nationality will be expressed and represented by those who thus speak it. What an incentive to aim at the purest and best expression of language, for any people! But it will be said that language is subject to change. If it is, so will the people who speak it to some extent change with it. Such change, however, is in its dress, in words mainly; rarely and at long intervals, and under very peculiar circumstances only, in its expression. As a matter of fact, I doubt whether a change of the idiomatic expression ever takes place.
The difference existing between the English spoken in the United States and the mother country might be cited as an example. The idiomatic expression is precisely the same. But the necessary self-reliance of the first settlers, the privation, the barter and exchange, the vast extent of the territory of this country, the greater independence enjoyed by its people, etc., might be named as reasons for the greater dash and freedom, together with a possible want of culture, as compared with the language spoken by educated Englishmen, prevailing in its utterance.
The same influences prevail regarding the general appearance, motions, and characteristic traits of these respective nations. Though closely allied and connected in a specific, and very nearly allied to each other in a general sense, there is that which distinguishes the English of the old world from those of the new, and which can be easily recognized.
Being centrifugal, the English idiom, octopus-like, embraces anything and everything that comes within the radius of its omnivorous capacity, without, however, losing its original character. It is like a fisherman who has hung out his net in the ocean, taking in all that comes along; or like the sea itself, greedy without end. It has no scruples about roots and construction, but construes everything according to its wants and adapts it to its uses as it comes along from any quarter.
These adopted children, these waifs, however, it must not be lost sight of, before they become integral parts of English speech must submit to a change of their original idiomatic expression. No matter who came—Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, or French—the people of the British Islands, while adopting their terms of expression, remained true to their original idiomatic expression. As this country absorbs people from the whole world and makes one homogeneous American nation of them, so has the English language absorbed, and is still absorbing, words from every other people's language, and has transformed them into one homogeneous language of its own.
Comparative philology, if it wants to accomplish that which would be most worthy of its efforts, will have to come down to these strong and basic roots of language.
The German language, whose idiomatic expression is centripetal, on the other hand, does not possess the same capacity for adopting foreign words and adapting them to its idiom. When it does adopt them, as, for instance, those of French origin, they are pronounced, not in the German, but, as far as the German people are capable of so doing, in the French manner. They could not, in fact, be pronounced in the German manner, the German language being a close corporation, so to say, which does not admit of any foreign shareholders; while the English language is a company open to all comers. While it is the endeavor of Germans to purify their language by expelling as far as possible any foreign word and element therefrom, Anglo-Saxons are constantly adopting new words from foreign languages. It would be equal to the labor of Sisyphus for Anglo-Saxons to endeavor to purify their language from foreign words, in the same sense that Germans are attempting to purify theirs.
It appears to me that the capacity of England for successful colonization is largely due to the centrifugal force inherent in its language, while the want of success of Germany for the same purpose is due to the absence of this force. Anglo-Saxon government tends toward decentralization, German toward centralization. I say this in spite of the fact that Germany is still divided into many principalities; the fact of its adherence to this undesirable condition being a proof of the correctness of this assertion rather than otherwise—Germans not being able to readily get out of that in which they are once rooted. In regard to governing peoples in distant territories or colonies, this tendency is of importance. English government, being undemonstrative, is more effective than German, which is demonstrative, meddlesome, and therefore offensive; the former being material and practical, the latter immaterial and inclined to be visionary.
In a word, where are we to find explanations regarding national traits of character except through inner motive powers, productive of results individual as well as national? There is no factor which exercises an influence upon a nation as a unit so wide in extent and of so powerful a nature as that of language. It is the only motive power, in fact, which every member of a nation shares with every other member thereof, but not with any member of any foreign nation.