The dangers are
as real, though we trust not as great, as the advantages. Family
quarrels are apt to be bitterest; a chance word will seem unkind and
unbearable from a near kinsman, which, coming from a stranger, would
carry no sting at all. As Lowell very truly said, "The common blood, and
still more the common language, are fatal instruments of
misapprehension." But behind this statement there lies a far deeper
though still obvious truth. We misunderstand because we understand; and
it would be an extravagance of pessimism to doubt that, in the long run,
understanding will carry the day. Light may dazzle here and bewilder
there; but, after all, it is light and not darkness. We English and
Americans hold a talisman that makes us at home over half, and more than
half, the world; and we are not going to rob it of its virtue by
renouncing our ties, and wantonly declaring ourselves aliens to each
other.
Our unity of speech is such a commonplace that we scarcely notice it.
But, rightly regarded, it is a thing to be rejoiced in with a great joy,
and not without a certain sense of danger happily escaped. He would have
been a bold man who should confidently have prophesied at the Revolution
that American and English would remain the same tongue, and that at the
end of the nineteenth century there would not be the slightest
perceptible cleavage, or threat of ultimate divergence.
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