the Romans was never deeper marked in those respects than our own. It is
a freeman's speech, this mother language. A slave can never speak it. He
garbles, clips, and mumbles it, makes 'quarter talk' of it. The hour he
learns to speak English he is spoiled for a slave. It is the tongue of
conquerors, the language of imperial will, of self-asserting
individuality, of courage, masterhood, and freedom. There is no need of
being thin-skinned under the charge of boasting. A man cannot very well
learn, in his cradle, 'the tongue that Shakspeare spake,' without
talking sometimes as if he and his owned creation.

For the tongue is the representative of the speaker. A people embodies
its soul in its language. And the people who inherit English have done
work enough in this little world to give them a right to do some
talking. They, at least, can speak their boast, and hear it seconded, in
the bold accents their mothers taught them, on every shore and on every
sea. They have been the world's day-laborers now for some centuries.
They have felled its forests, drained its marshes, dug in its mines,
ploughed its wastes, built its cities. They have done rough pioneer work
over all its surface. They have done it, too, as it never was done
before. They have made it _stay done_. They have never given up one inch
of conquered ground. They have never yielded back one square foot to
barbarism. Won once to civilization, under their leadership, and your
square mile of savage waste and jungle is won forever.

We are inclined to think the world might bear with us. We talk a great
deal about ourselves, perhaps; but, on the whole, are we not buying the
privilege? Did a race ever buckle to its business in this world in more
splendid style than our own? With both hands clenched, stripped to the
waist, blackened and begrimed and sweat bathed, this race takes its
place in the vanguard of the world and bends to its chosen toil. The
grand, patient, hopeful people, how they grasp blind brute nature, and
tame her, and use her at their word! How they challenge and defeat in
the death grapple the grim giants of the waste and the storm--fever,
famine, and the frost!

You will find them down, to-day, among the firedamps in the mines,
to-morrow among the splendid pinnacles of the mountains, to settle a
fact of science, or add a mite to human knowledge. Here is one,
painfully toiling through the tangled depths of a desert continent, to
find a highway for comm