the individuality of the several States is destined
to go on being continuously more merged--until it will finally be almost
obliterated--in the Federal whole; but it may be said that in the last
twenty-five years, and not until then, has the American people become
truly unified--an entity conscious of its oneness and of its commercial
greatness in that oneness, thinking common thoughts, co-operating in
common ambitions, and speaking a common speech. Into that speech were at
first absorbed, as has been said, the peculiarities, localisms, and
provincialisms which had inevitably grown up in different sections in
the days of non-communication. But precisely those same causes--the
settlement of the country, the construction of the railways, the
development of the natural resources--which contributed to the
unification and laid the foundations of the greatness, produced, with
wealth and leisure, new ambitions in the people. The desire for art and
literature and, what we have called the all-culture, was no new growth,
but an instinct inherited from the original English stock. Quickened it
must have been by the moral uplifting of the people by the Civil War,
but, as we have already seen, for some time after the close of that war
the whole energies of the people were necessarily devoted to material
things. Only with the completion of the repairing of the ravages of that
war, and with the almost coincident settlement of the last great waste
tracts of the country, were the people free to reach out after things
immaterial and aesthetic; and only with the accession of wealth, which
again these same causes produced, came the possibility of gratifying the
craving for those things. And in the longing for self-improvement and
self-culture, thus newly inspired and for the first time truly national,
one of the things to which the people turned with characteristic
earnestness was the improvement of the common speech. The nation has set
itself purposefully and with determination to purify and prevent the
further corruption of its language.

The movement towards "simplification" of the spelling may or may not be
in the direction of purification, but it will be observed that the
movement itself could not have come into being without the national
desire for improvement. The American speech is now the speech of a
solidified and great nation; and it cannot be permitted to retain the
inelegancies and colloquialisms which were not intolerable, per