(1899)
IV
THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN
There is a wide gap between the proverb asserting that “figures never lie” and the opinion expressed now and again by experts that nothing can be more mendacious than statistics misapplied; and the truth seems to lie between these extreme sayings. Just as chronology is the backbone of history, so a statement of fact can be made terser and more convincing if the figures are set forth that illuminate it. If we wish to perceive the change of the relative position of Great Britain and the United States in the course of the centuries, nothing can help us better to a firm grasp of the exact facts of the case than a comparison of the population of the two countries at various periods.
In 1700 the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland numbered between eight and nine millions, while the inhabitants of what is now the United States were, perhaps, a scant three hundred thousand. In 1900, the people of the British Isles are reckoned at some thirty-seven millions more or less, and the people of the United States are almost exactly twice as many, being about seventy-five millions. To project a statistical curve into the future is an extra-hazardous proceeding; and no man can now guess at the probable population either of the United Kingdom or of the United States in the year 2000; but as the rate of increase is far larger in America than in England, there is little risk in suggesting that a hundred years from now the population of the American republic will be at least four or five times as large as that of the British monarchy.
Just as the center of population of the United States has been steadily working its way westward, having been in 1800 in Maryland and being in 1900 in Indiana, so also the center of population of the English-speaking race has been steadily moving toward the Occident. Just as the first of these has had to cross the Alleghanies during the nineteenth century, so will the second of them have to cross the Atlantic during the twentieth century. Whether this latter change shall take place early in the century or late, is not important; one day or another it will take place, assuredly.
Inevitably it will be accompanied or speedily followed by another change of almost equal significance. London sooner or later will cease to be the literary center of the English-speaking race. For many centuries the town by the Thames has been the heart of English literature; and there are now visible very few signs that the days of its supremacy are numbered. Even in the United States to-day the old colonial attitude, not yet abandoned, causes us Americans often to be as well acquainted with second-rate British authors as the British are with American authors of the first rank. Yet it is not without significance that at the close of the nineteenth century the two most widely known writers of the language should be one of them an American citizen and the other a British colonial, owing no local allegiance to London—Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling.
The disestablishment of London as the literary center of English will be retarded by various circumstances. Only very reluctantly is a tradition of preëminence overthrown when consecrated by the centuries. The conditions of existence in England are likely long to continue to be more favorable to literary productivity than are the conditions in America. In a new country literature finds an eager rival in life itself, with all its myriad opportunities for self-expression. No paradox is it to say that more than one American bard may have preferred to build his epic in steel or in stone rather than in words. The creative imagination has outlets here denied it in a long-settled community, residing tranquilly in a little island, where even the decorous landscape seems to belong to the Established Church. But the Eastern States are already, many of them, as orderly and as placid as Great Britain has been for a century. The conditions in England and in America are constantly tending toward equalization.
A time will come, and probably long before the close of the twentieth century, when there will be in the United States not only several times as many people as there are in the British Isles, but also far more literary activity. Sooner or later most of the leading authors of English literature will be American and not British in their training, in their thought, in their ideals. That is to say, the British in the middle of the twentieth century will hold to the Americans about the same position that the Americans held toward the British in the middle of the nineteenth century. The group of American authors between 1840 and 1860 contained Irving and Cooper, Emerson and Hawthorne, Longfellow and Lowell, Poe and Whitman and Thoreau. These are names endeared to us and highly important to us, and not to be neglected in any consideration of English literature; but it is foolish for an American to seek to set them up as the equal of the British group flourishing during the same score of years. So in the middle of the twentieth century the British group will probably not lack striking individualities; but, as a whole, it will probably be surpassed by the American group. The largest portion of the men of letters who use English to express themselves, as well as the largest body of the English-speaking race, will have its residence on the western shore of the Western Ocean.
What will then happen to the English language in England when England awakens to the fact that the center of the English-speaking race is no longer within the borders of the little island? Will the speech of the British sink into dialectic corruption, or will the British resolutely stamp out their undue local divergences from the normal English of the main body of the users of the language in the United States? Will they frankly accept the inevitable? Will they face the facts as they are? Will they follow the lead of the Americans when we shall have the leadership of the language, as the Americans followed their lead when they had it? Or will they insist on an arbitrary independence, which can have only one result—the splitting off of the British branch of our speech from the main stem of the language? To ask these questions is to project an inquiry far into the future, but the speculation is not without an interest of its own. And altho it is difficult to decide so far in advance of the event, yet we have now some of the material on which to base a judgment as to what is likely to happen.
Of course, the question is not one to be answered offhand; and not a few arguments could be brought forward in support of the opinion that the British speech of the future is likely to separate itself from the main body of English as then spoken in this country. In the first place, England, altho it has already ceased to be the most populous of the countries using English, will still be the senior partner of the great trading-company known as the British Empire. That the British Empire may be dissolved is possible, no doubt. The Australian colonies have federated; and having formed a strong union of their own, they may prefer to stand alone. South Africa may follow the example of Australia. India may arise in the might of her millions and cast out its English rulers. Canada may decide to throw in its lot with the greater American republic. But each of these things is improbable; and that they should all come to pass is practically inconceivable. All signs now seem to point not only to a continuance of the British Empire, but also to its steady expansion. London is likely long to be the capital of an empire upon which the sun never sets, an empire inhabited by men of every color and every creed and every language. For these men English must serve as the means of communication one with another, Hindu with Parsee, Boer with Zulu, Chinook with Canuck.