n _I_ and _me_, _he_ and _him_, _we_
and _us_, has been too great for any serious possibility of form
leveling. It does not follow that the case distinction as such is still
vital. One of the most insidious peculiarities of a linguistic drift is
that where it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it
innocuous by washing the old significance out of it. It turns its very
enemies to its own uses. This brings us to the second of the major
drifts, the tendency to fixed position in the sentence, determined by
the syntactic relation of the word.

[Footnote 141: Except in so far as _that_ has absorbed other
functions than such as originally belonged to it. It was only a
nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.]

We need not go into the history of this all-important drift. It is
enough to know that as the inflected forms of English became scantier,
as the syntactic relations were more and more inadequately expressed by
the forms of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradually
took over functions originally foreign to it. _The man_ in _the man sees
the dog_ is subjective; in _the dog sees the man_, objective. Strictly
parallel to these sentences are _he sees the dog_ and _the dog sees
him_. Are the subjective value of _he_ and the objective value of _him_
entirely, or even mainly, dependent on the difference of form? I doubt
it. We could hold to such a view if it were possible to say _the dog
sees he_ or _him sees the dog_. It was once possible to say such things,
but we have lost the power. In other words, at least part of the case
feeling in _he_ and _him_ is to be credited to their position before or
after the verb. May it not be, then, that _he_ and _him_, _we_ and _us_,
are not so much subjective and objective forms as pre-verbal and
post-verbal[142] forms, very much as _my_ and _mine_ are now pre-nominal
and post-nominal forms of the possessive (_my father_ but _father mine_;
_it is my book_ but _the book is mine_)? That this interpretation
corresponds to the actual drift of the English language is again
indicated by the language of the folk. The folk says _it is me_, not _it
is I_, which is "correct" but just as falsely so as the _whom did you
see_? that we have analyzed. _I'm the one_, _it's me_; _we're the ones_,
_it's us that will win out_--such are the live parallelisms in English
to-day. There is little doubt that _it is I_ will one day be as
impossible in English as _c'est je_, for _c'est moi