any development of a British branch of the language after the numerical preponderance of the American people becomes overwhelming. And working toward the same union is a loyal conservatism, due in a measure to a proud enjoyment of the great literature of the language, the common possession of both British and Americans, having its past in the keeping of the elder division of the stock, and certain to transfer its future to the care of the younger division. To declare that the literary center of English is to be transferred sooner or later from the British Isles to the United States may seem to some a hazardous prediction; and yet it is as safe as any prophecy before the event can hope to be. Such a transfer, it is true, is perhaps unprecedented in literary history, -altho the scholar may see a close parallel in the preeminence once attained by Alexandria as the capital of Greek culture. Unprecedented or not, phenomenal or not, the transfer is inevitable sooner or later. (1899) IT AMERICANISMS ONCE MORE T is a reflection upon what we are wont to term a liberal education that the result of college training sometimes appears to be rather a narrowing of the mental outlook than the broadening we have a right to anticipate. What a student ought to have got from his four years of labor is a conviction of the vastness of human knowledge and a proper humility, due to his discovery that he himself possesses only an infinitesimal fraction of the total sum. Many graduates -indeed, most of them nowadays, we may hope-have attained to this much of wisdom: that they are not puffed up by the few things they do know, so much as made modest by the many things they cannot but admit themselves to be ignorant of. With the increasing specialization of the higher education, the attitude of the graduate is likely to be increasingly humble; and a college man will not be led to feel that he is expected to know everything about everything. Perhaps the disputatious arrogance of a few of the younger graduates of an earlier generation was due to the dogmatism of the teaching they sat under. In nothing is our later instruction more improved than in the disappearance of this authoritative tone-due in great measure, it may be, to the unsettling of old theories by new facts. In no department of learning was the manner more dogmatic than in the teaching of the English language. The older rhetoricians had no doubts at all on the subject. They never hesitated as to the finality of their own judgment on all disputed points. They were sure that they knew just what the English language ought to be; and it never entered into their heads to question their own competence to declare the standard of speech. Yet, as a matter of fact, they knew little of the long history of the language, and they had no insight into the principles that were governing its development. At most, their information was limited to the works of their immediate predecessors; and for a more remote past they had the same supreme contempt they were ever displaying toward the actual present. Thus they were ever ready to lay down rules made up out of their own heads; and their acts were as arbitrary as their attitude was intolerant. In his 'Philosophy of Rhetoric,' which he tells us was planned in 1750, Dr. George Campbell quotes with approval Dr. Johnson's assertion that |