The sands of the seashore, the drops of the ocean, are few when compared to the mighty current of words which are poured into the world by millions upon millions of human tongues. It is the tie of a common language which indefinably and inexpressibly knits together all those who have inherited it. "The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and most desirable that can unite mankind."[2] The English language is a synonym of English thought, passion, pleasure, pain, suffering. It expresses all our intimate and fundamental ideas of law, religion and politics. It means home, {111} parents, relatives, and friends. It conveys to the mind all the hopes, wishes, aspirations, and emotions of the English-speaking races.
When an Englishman and an American meet, no matter how casually, their common tongue furnishes, immediately, a means of communication which makes them "Native to the manner born." A few spoken words, a few lines of correspondence, open up, if need be, the whole life of each nation: its politics, its forms and principles of justice, its religion, its domestic interests and feelings, its science, its drama, its literature, its past, present, and future. It establishes a sympathy and bond in all common things. If they discuss a question of municipal law, they know without explanation the principles and proceedings applicable to it. If literature, they immediately refer to some common standard. Details are understood and employed without comment or explanation. Their common sympathies, their common methods of thought, their common judgments, are substantially the same. They may differ in form of expression and thought, and in other superficial outward methods, but ideas of the principles of a free constitutional government, of justice, right, truth, liberty, and religion, are cast in the same uniform mould in English and American breasts. If confronted with one of another race, their language in these respects would at once evince their common origin. Despite individual prejudice and personal dislikes, there is a substantial groundwork of sympathy between an American and an Englishman as to what is fundamentally {112} right and wrong, and as to how the right should be asserted and the wrong redressed and punished, even to the minutest degree of assimilation or repugnancy. And this is so, even where there may be a difference of opinion as to the merits of the immediate subject of controversy.
An Englishman and a Frenchman, meeting for the first time, although capable of expressing themselves in one or both languages, have no common ideas or sympathy in questions of law, religion, politics, history, or literature. Such questions, even among cultivated people, are only treated of in the abstract. One word, which would open a fountain of sympathy between Englishmen and Americans when speaking to each other; would be a dry well of thought to a Frenchman, German, or Russian, involving long and intricate explanations, even where there was more than average intelligence and knowledge on both sides. That indefinable and untranslatable perception of English and American manners, customs, and tastes—which, Mr. Burke says, are stronger than laws—can never be conveyed or understood except by the native English tongue, to a native Englishman or American.
It is impossible to enhance the importance of this uniformity of language, in holding the race together and in rendering the genius of its most favoured members available for the civilisation of all.
As Mr. Grote says of the Greeks,[3] "Except in {113} the rarest cases, the divergences of dialect were not such as to prevent every Greek from understanding and being understood by every other Greek." Language, therefore, made in all its widely spread settlements the bond and badge of the Greek race. Without it, other instrumentalities of co-operation, such as religion, would not have been available.
It is due to their common language that all the Greeks come to us as one people; yet Homer was Scian; Anacreon, Teian; Pindar, Bœotian; Sappho and Alcreus, Lesbian; Herodotus, Carian; Aristotle, Stageirean. Language dissolved all differences between them. Notwithstanding the invincible political obstacles which kept them apart, by virtue of language, they all gloried in the name of Hellas, and eagerly disputed who was best entitled to that name, and who had best illustrated its greatness. A stimulating and fruitful rivalry!
The same thought is elaborated in other relations by Professor
Freeman.[4]
"Primarily, I say, as a rule, but a rule subject to exceptions, as a prima facie standard, subject to special reasons to the contrary, we define the nation by language. We may at least apply the test negatively. It would be unsafe to rule that all speakers of the same language must have a common nationality; but we may safely say that when there is not community of language there is no common nationality in the highest sense. It is true that without community of language there may be an artificial nationality, a nationality which may be good for political purposes, and which may engender a common national feeling. Still this is not quite the same thing as that {114} fuller national unity which is felt where there is community of language. In fact, mankind instinctively takes language as the badge of nationality."
Pursuing the thought and reverting to the Greeks, I am tempted to take an example from Herodotus of what Athens could do in her nobler moods. Secretly dreading her power of resistance after Marathon and Salamis, but after all Attica had been overrun and devastated, Mardonius sought to detach her from the alliance of those communities which still remained faithful to the common cause. Fearful that the bribes and flatteries of the Persian might prevail, Sparta sent her ambassadors who met at the same moment with those of Mardonius, and their respective interests were openly debated in the presence of Athenians. After hearing both, the Athenians replied, first to the Persians, or their representative ally, Alexander of Macedon:
"We know as well as thou dost that the power of the Mede is many times greater than our own; we did not need to have that cast in our teeth. Nevertheless we cling so to freedom that we shall offer what resistance we may. Seek not to persuade us into making terms with the barbarians; say what thou wilt, thou wilt never gain our assent. Return rather at once and tell Mardonius that our answer to him is this: So long as the sun keeps his present course we will never join alliance with Xerxes. Nay, we shall oppose him unceasingly, trusting in the aid of those gods and heroes whom he has lightly esteemed, whose houses and whose images he has burnt with fire. And come not thou again to us with words like these, nor, thinking to do us a service, persuade us to unholy actions. Thou art the guest and friend of our nation; we would not that thou shouldst receive hurt at our hands."[5]