ew
Holland? Let history answer the question. The art of printing,
interchange of books, and commercial intercourse will retard the
progress of mutation and diversities; but no human means can prevent
some changes, and the adaptation of language to diversities of condition
and improvement. The process of a living language is like the motion of
a broad river, which flows with a slow, silent, irresistible current."
He turns the tables on a writer who points out American barbarisms by
showing a number of English barbarisms which had been creeping into use,
and declares that in the use of language one nation as well as the other
will commit these errors, but he returns again and again to his position
that Americans in their use of language are not to wait passively upon
English authority.

"I venerate," he says, "the men and their writings; I venerate the
literature, the laws, the institutions, and the charities of the land of
my fathers. But I deprecate the effects of a blind acquiescence in the
opinions of men, and the passive reception of everything that comes from
a foreign press. My mind revolts at the reverence for foreign authors,
which stifles inquiry, restrains investigation, benumbs the vigor of the
intellectual faculties, subdues and debases the mind. I regret to see
the young Hercules of genius in America chained to his cradle.... I left
college with the same veneration for English writers, and the same
confidence in their opinions, which most of my countrymen now possess,
and I adopted their errors without examination. After many years of
research, I am compelled to withdraw much of that confidence, and to
look with astonishment upon the errors and false principles which they
have propagated; some of them of far more consequence than any which
have been mentioned in the preceding remarks. I wish to be on good terms
with the English; it is my interest and the interest of my
fellow-citizens to treat them as friends and brethren. But I will be
neither frowned nor ridiculed into error, and a servile imitation of
practices which I know or believe to be corrupt. I will examine subjects
for myself, and endeavor to find the truth, and to defend it, whether it
accords with English opinions or not. If I must measure swords with
their travelers and their reviewers, on the subject under consideration,
I shall not decline the combat. There is nothing which, in my opinion,
so debases the genius and character of my countrymen