have been almost incomprehensible to one
another. They differed in accent, in idiom, and in their very names for
things. They differed in their ideas about things. They were, in plain
English, foreigners one to another. Now they differ only in accent, and
even that is a dwindling difference. Their language has become ampler
because now they read. They read books--or, at any rate, they learn to
read out of books--and certainly they read newspapers and those scrappy
periodicals that people like bishops pretend to think so detrimental to
the human mind, periodicals that it is cheaper to make at centres and
uniformly, than locally in accordance with local needs. Since the
newspaper cannot fit the locality, the locality has to broaden its mind
to the newspaper, and to ideas acceptable in other localities. The word
and the idiom of the literary language and the pronunciation suggested
by its spelling tends to prevail over the local usage. And moreover
there is a persistent mixing of peoples going on, migration in search of
employment and so on, quite unprecedented before the railways came. Few
people are content to remain in that locality and state of life "into
which it has pleased God to call them." As a result, dialectic purity
has vanished, dialects are rapidly vanishing, and novel differentiations
are retarded or arrested altogether. Such novelties as do establish
themselves in a locality are widely disseminated almost at once in books
and periodicals.

A parallel arrest of dialectic separation has happened in France, in
Italy, in Germany, and in the States. It is not a process peculiar to
any one nation. It is simply an aspect of the general process that has
arisen out of mechanical locomotion. The organization of elementary
education has no doubt been an important factor, but the essential
influence working through this circumstance is the fact that paper is
relatively cheap to type-setting, and both cheap to authorship--even the
commonest sorts of authorship--and the wider the area a periodical or
book serves the bigger, more attractive, and better it can be made for
the same money. And clearly this process of assimilation will continue.
Even local differences of accent seem likely to follow. The itinerant
dramatic company, the itinerant preacher, the coming extension of
telephones and the phonograph, which at any time in some application to
correspondence or instruction may cease to be a toy, all these things
attack,