nergetic, incisive, they do the hard labor of
speech,--that of carrying heavy loads of thought and shaping new ideas.

We think them vulgar at first, and savoring of the shop; but they are
useful and handy, and we cannot do without them. They rivet, they forge,
they coin, they "fire up," "brake up," "switch off," "prospect," "shin"
for us when we are "short," "post up" our books, and finally ourselves,
"strike a lead," "follow a trail," "stand up to the rack," "dicker,"
"swap," and "peddle." They are "whole teams" beside the "one-horse"
vapidities which fail to bear our burdens. The Norman cannot keep down
the Saxon. The Saxon finds his Wat Tyler or Jack Cade. Now "Mose" brings
his Bowery Boys into our parlor, or Cromwell Judd recruits his Ironsides
from the hamlets of the Kennebec.

We declare for the proletaires. We vote the working-words ticket. We
have to plead the cause of American idioms. Some of them have, as we
said, good blood in them and can trace their lineage and standing to the
English Bible and Book of Common Prayer; others are "new men," born
under hedge-rows and left as foundlings at furnace-doors. And before we
go farther, we have a brief story to tell in illustration of the
two tongues.

A case of assault and battery was tried in a Western court. The
plaintiff's counsel informed the jury in his opening, that he was
"prepared to prove that the defendant, a steamboat-captain, menaced his
client, an English traveller, and put him in bodily fear, commanding him
to vacate the avenue of the steamboat with his baggage, or he would
precipitate him into the river." The evidence showed that the captain
called out,--"Stranger, ef you don't tote your plunder off that
gang-plank, I'll spill you in the drink."

We submit that for terseness and vigor the practitioner at the bar of
the Ohio had the better of the learned counsel who appeared at the bar
of justice, albeit his client was in a Cockney mystification at
the address.

The illustration will serve our turn. It points to a class of phrases
which are indigenous to various localities of the land, in which the
native thought finds appropriate, bold, and picturesque utterance. And
these in time become incorporate into the universal tongue. Of them is
the large family of political phrases. These are coined in moments of
intense excitement, struck out at white heat, or, to follow our leading
metaphor, like the speakers who use them, come upon the stump in their