ct of time
accumulating and multiplying, might in the end have justified the
regarding of the languages as no longer one and the same. It could not
have failed but that such differences should have displayed themselves;
for while there is a law of _necessity_ in the evolution of languages,
while they pursue certain courses and in certain directions, from which
they can be no more turned aside by the will of men than one of the
heavenly bodies could be pushed from its orbit by any engines of ours,
there is a law of _liberty_ no less; and this liberty must inevitably
have made itself in many ways felt. In the political and social
condition of America, so far removed from our own, in the many natural
objects which are not the same with those which surround us here, in
efforts independently carried out to rid the language of imperfections,
or to unfold its latent powers, even in the different effects of soil
and climate on the organs of speech, there would have been causes enough
to have provoked in the course of time not immaterial divergencies of
language.

As it is, however, the joint operation of those three causes referred to
already, namely, that the separation did not take place in the infancy
or youth of the language, but only in its ripe manhood, that England and
America owned a body of literature, to which they alike looked up and
appealed as containing the authoritative standards of the language, that
the intercourse between the one people and the other has been large and
frequent, hereafter probably to be larger and more frequent still, has
effectually wrought. It has been strong enough so to traverse, repress,
and check all those causes which tended to divergence, that the
_written_ language of educated men on both sides of the water remains
precisely the same, their _spoken_ manifesting a few trivial
differences of idiom; while even among those classes which do not
consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of language, there are
scarcely greater differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist
between inhabitants of different provinces in this one island of
England; and in the future we may reasonably anticipate that these
differences, so far from multiplying, will rather diminish and
disappear.

{Sidenote: _Extinct English_}

But I must return from this long digression. It seems often as if an
almost unaccountable caprice presided over the fortunes of words, and
determined which should live and whic