nded on the personalities of the particular writers. A comparison
between the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the real
journalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing. It is the
expansion of a slight difference of style into a luxuriant difference of
idiom; and the process continued indefinitely would certainly produce a
totally different language. After a few centuries the signatures of
American ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic, and the very
name of the Republic be as strange as Sinn Fein.

It is true that there has been on the surface a certain amount of give
and take; or at least, as far as the English are concerned, of take
rather than give. But it is true that it was once all the other way; and
indeed the one thing is something like a just nemesis of the other.
Indeed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, when we come to
think of it. It began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certain
well-meaning people who talked about the English-speaking race; and were
apparently indifferent to how the English was spoken, whether in the
accent of a Jamaican negro or a convict from Botany Bay. It was their
logical tendency to say that Dante was a Dago. It was their logical
punishment to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there may have
been a period when this Anglo-American amalgamation included more or
less equal elements from England and America. It never included the
larger elements, or the more valuable elements of either. But, on the
whole, I think it true to say that it was not an allotment but an
interchange of parts; and that things first went all one way and then
all the other. People began by telling the Americans that they owed all
their past triumphs to England; which was false. They ended up by
telling the English that they would owe all their future triumphs to
America; which is if possible still more false. Because we chose to
forget that New York had been New Amsterdam, we are now in danger of
forgetting that London is not New York. Because we insisted that Chicago
was only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may yet see Chiswick an
inferior imitation of Chicago. Our Anglo-Saxon historians attempted that
conquest in which Howe and Burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely less
justification on their side. They attempted the great crime of the
Anglicisation of America. They have called down the punishment of the
Americanisation of England. We must not murmur; but it is