us dialects?

When an Englishman does learn a foreign language, it is most commonly
for literary or scholastic purposes, rather than (with the exception of
French in certain classes) for conversational use. The American on the
other hand, having had no need of languages in the past, coming now in
contact with the world, sees that there are three or four languages of
Europe which it is most desirable that he should know, if only for
commercial purposes; and a language learned for commercial purposes must
be mastered colloquially and idiomatically. The American is not
distracted by the need of Sanskrit or of any one of the numerous more or
less primitive tongues which a certain proportion of the English people
must acquire if the business of the Empire is to go on. Nor is his
vision confused by seeing all the European tongues jumbled, as it were,
together before him at too close range. He can distinguish which are the
essential or desirable languages for his purposes; and the rising
generation of Americans is learning those languages more generally, and
in a more practical way, than is the rising generation of Englishmen.

* * * * *

And yet we have not crossed that morass;--nor perhaps, however superior
in folly we may be to the angels, is it desirable that we should in
plain daylight. We have at most found some slight vantage-ground: thrown
up a mole-hill of a Pisgah from which we can attain a distant view of
what lies beyond the swamp, even if perchance we have taken some mirages
and _ignes fatui_ for solid landscape and actual illuminations.

The ambitions and ideals of the two peoples are fundamentally alike; nor
is there so great a difference as appears on the surface in their method
of striving to attain those ideals and realise those ambitions, albeit
the American uses certain tools (modern he calls them, the Englishman
preferring to say new-fangled) to which the Englishman's hands have not
taken kindly. It is natural that the English nation, having a so much
larger past, should be more influenced by it than the American. It is
natural that the American, conscious that his national character has but
just shaped itself out of the void, with all the future before it,
should look more to the present and the future than the Englishman.

The Englishman prefers to turn almost exclusively to the study of
antiquity--the art and philosophies and letters of past ages--for the
foundation of