almost to alter the career of a planet as for man to alter
these. This is sometimes a subject of regret with those who see what
they believe manifest defects or blemishes in their language, and such
as appear to them capable of remedy. And yet in fact this is well; since
for once that these redressers of real or fancied wrongs, these
suppliers of things lacking, would have mended, we may be tolerably
confident that ten times, yea, a hundred times, they would have marred;
letting go that which would have been well retained; retaining that
which by a necessary law the language now dismisses and lets go; and in
manifold ways interfering with those processes of a natural logic, which
are here evermore at work. The genius of a language, unconsciously
presiding over all its transformations, and conducting them to a
definite issue, will have been a far truer, far safer guide, than the
artificial wit, however subtle, of any single man, or of any association
of men. For the genius of a language is the sense and inner conviction
of all who speak it, as to what it ought to be, and the means by which
it will best attain its objects; and granting that a pair of eyes, or
two or three pairs of eyes may see much, yet millions of eyes will
certainly see more.

{Sidenote: _German Purists_}

It is only with the words, and not with the forms and laws of a
language, that any interference such as I have just supposed is
possible. Something, indeed much, may here be done by wise masters, in
the way of rejecting that which would deform, allowing and adopting that
which will strengthen and enrich. Those who would purify or enrich a
language, so long as they have kept within this their proper sphere,
have often effected much, more than at first could have seemed possible.
The history of the German language affords so much better illustration
of this than our own would do, that I shall make no scruple in seeking
my examples there. When the patriotic Germans began to wake up to a
consciousness of the enormous encroachments which foreign languages,
the Latin and French above all, had made on their native tongue, the
lodgements which they had therein effected, and the danger which
threatened it, namely, that it should cease to be German at all, but
only a mingle-mangle, a variegated patchwork of many languages, without
any unity or inner coherence at all, various societies were instituted
among them, at the beginning and during the course of the s