atises. In the course
of my researches I have discovered a multitude of errors and false
principles, and numerous defects in such treatises; and as I have pushed
my inquiries probably much farther than any other man, I am satisfied
that the evidence I can lay before the public will convince you that
there is a rich mine of knowledge to be opened on this subject that your
English friends have never yet discovered." He takes up Pickering's
Vocabulary and rapidly criticises the several entries; he renews his
criticism upon Johnson and Lowth, but the most interesting part of the
pamphlet is his stout advocacy of the claim of Americans to make and
accept changes of language which grow out of their own conditions. The
English language was a common inheritance in England and America, and in
the necessary growth of a spoken language, Americans had equal right
with Englishmen to contribute to the growth; nay, that the American was
not a dialect of the English, but a variation; not a departure from a
standard existing in contemporary England, but an independent branch
from a common stock.

"New words should not be introduced into a copious language without
reason, nor contrary to its analogies. But a living language must keep
pace with improvements in knowledge, and with the multiplication of
ideas. Those who would entirely restrain the practice of using new words
seem not to consider that the limit they now prescribe would have been
as just and rational, a thousand or two thousand years ago, as it is at
this period. If it should be said, we have words enough to express all
our ideas, it may be truly answered, so had our ancestors when they left
the plains of Germany; or when they first crossed the Hellespont; or
when they left the soil of Persia. And what then? Would the words they
then used be now sufficient for our purpose. And who can define the
bounds of future improvement? Who will venture to allege that men have
not yet as much to learn as they have already learnt? The smallest
acquaintance with the history of human society and improvement ought to
silence the critics on this subject.

"Nor are we to believe that two nations inhabiting countries separated
by a wide ocean can preserve a perfect uniformity of language. If a
perfect uniformity cannot be produced or preserved in two distant
counties in England, how is this object to be effected between the
English in Great Britain and their descendants in America, India, or N