But if the
many tongues of Europe retard its fusion into what I have called a
political aggregate, there exists in the world a political aggregate
larger in extent than either Europe or the United States, which
possesses, like the United States, the advantage of one dominant
language. I mean, of course, the British Empire; and surely it is,
on the face of it, a fact of good augury for the world that the
dominant language of these two vast aggregations of democracies should
happen to be one and the same. The hopes--and perhaps, too, some
apprehensions--arising from this unity of speech will form the subject
of another article.
POSTSCRIPT.--My representation of the South as the conservative and the
North as the innovating party is the only point in this article to
which (so far as I know) serious objection has been made. A very able
and courteous critic--Mr. Norman Hapgood--writes to me as follows: "I
think the history of the Kansas-Nebraska trouble, in which the
preliminary conflict centred, the speeches of the time, North and South,
the party platforms, all proved that the North said, 'Slavery shall keep
its rights and have no further extension,' while the South said, 'It
shall go into any newly-acquired territory it chooses.
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