d
Aberdeen." And Stevenson understates the case. There are differences of
speech in America, but at the most they remain so slight that, after
all, the resident in one section will rather pride himself on his
acuteness in recognising the intonation of the stranger as being that of
some other--of the South, it may be, or of New England. An educated
Londoner has difficulty in understanding even the London cockney.
Suffolk, Cornish, or Lancashire--these are almost foreign tongues to
him. The American of the South has at least no difficulty in
understanding the New Englander: the New Yorker does not have to make
the Californian repeat each sentence that he utters.

And this similarity of tongue--this universal mutual
comprehensibility--is a fact of great importance to the nation. It must
tend to rapidity of communication--to greater uniformity of thought--to
much greater readiness in the people to concentrate as a nation on one
idea or one object. How much does England not lose--there is no way of
measuring, but the amount must be very great--by the fact that
communication of thought is practically impossible between people who
are neighbours? How much would it not contribute to the national
alertness, to national efficiency, if the local dialects could be swept
away and the peasantry and gentry of all England--nay of the British
Isles--talk together easily in one tongue? It is impossible not to
believe that this ease in the interchange of ideas must in itself
contribute greatly to uniformity of thought and character in a people.
Possessing it, it is not easy to see how the American people could have
failed to become more homogeneous than the English.

But there is a deeper reason for their homogeneousness. The American
people is not only an English people; it is much more Anglo-Saxon than
the English themselves. We have already seen how the essential quality
of both peoples is an Anglo-Saxon quality--what has been called (and the
phrase will do as well as any other) their "Particularist" instinct. The
Angles and Saxons (with some modification in the former) were tribes of
individual workers, sprung from the soil, rooted in it, accustomed
always to rely on individual labour and individual impulse rather than
on the initiative, the protection, or the assistance of the State or the
community. The constitutional history of England is little more than the
story of the steps by which the Anglo-Saxon, by the strength which this