Dark Continent; as well as peopling Australia and many a distant colony with her industrious children. Half of all this I consider is America's, as she may also claim a large and substantial part in the spread of the Anglo-Saxon race through this vast new world, under that lovely and honored banner of which I must think our old poet was dreaming, when he sang:—
"Her lightness and brightness do shine in such spendor,
That none but the stars are thought fit to attend her."
Beyond all, I say, we share together that glorious language of Shakespeare, which it will be our common duty, and I think our manifest destiny, to establish as a general tongue of the globe. This seems to be inevitable, not without a certain philological regret, since, if I were to choose an old tongue, I think I would prefer, for its music and its majesty, the beautiful Castilian. Nevertheless, the whole world must eventually talk our speech, which is already so prevalent, that to circumnavigate the globe no other is necessary. And even in the by-streets of Japan, the bazars of India and China, and the villages of Malaya, one-half of their shops write up the name and goods in English. Is not this alone well-nigh enough to link us in pride and peace? The English poet Cowper has nobly written:—
"Time was when it was praise and boast enough,
In every clime, travel where'er we might,
That we were born her children; fame enough
To fill the mission of a common man,
That Chatham's language was his native tongue."
Let us all try to keep in speech and in writing as close as we can to the pure English that Shakespeare and Milton, and in these later times Longfellow, Emerson and Hawthorne, have fixed. [Applause.] It will not be easy. When I was conversing recently with Lord Tennyson, and expressing similar opinions, he said to me: "It is bad for us that English will always be a spoken speech, since that means that it will always be changing, and so the time will come when you and I will be as hard to read for the common people as Chaucer is to-day." You remember what opinion your brilliant humorist, Artemus Ward, let fall concerning that ancient singer. "Mr. Chaucer," he observed
