much would be accomplished by it? The answer is that if fully carried out, it could do no more than prepare the way for the genuinely expressive use of English. It could provide equality of opportunity, by no means equality, or even assurance, of achievement. The three cherished guarantees of our government are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right to live no one would readily relinquish, though the civilization that had gone no further than to assure the right to live could not be said to have advanced very far. Liberty also is a qualified privilege in a democratic society, being best defined as the right to do what under the circumstances seems practicable. In the same way, the third of these guarantees promises nothing except a qualified opportunity. It asserts only the right of the pursuit of happiness - let him catch it who can. In short, these guarantees merely clear the ground of obstructions by giving the citizen as free a field for the exercise of his energies as the circumstances permit. And the teaching of a uniform system of the elements of speech does very much the same thing in English. It removes the handicaps which the person might suffer under who never had the opportunity to take these first steps towards a genuinely expressive command over English. They remain nevertheless very rudimentary first steps. If every man, woman, and child in America could be taught to spell, write, and speak correctly, that is, regularly, this achievement in itself would be nothing to be proud of. It would mean merely that every man, woman, and child had been provided with the same practical implement of expression, but the value of the achievement could be determined only by the use to which this implement was put. That we are still

laboring at the uncompleted task of directing first steps shows how difficult of realization any more ambitious program of democratic education in English would be. Sufficient unto the day, however, is the labor thereof, and humble though it be, the endeavor to secure uniformity in the elements of popular speech presents itself as the inescapable consequence of the drift towards regularity in our day and generation.

VIII

CORRECTNESS

In the preceding chapters the English language has been discussed from the most comprehensive point of view. It has been described first as the language of the English speaking peoples. It was then pointed out that this English language which is characteristic of the English speaking peoples as a whole is nevertheless broken up into - a great number of smaller languages or dialects. The next point was that popularly dialects are thought of as fluctuating and inferior forms of speech, measured and condemned in comparison with some supposedly unvarying and superior form of the speech. But it was then shown that no such absolute or single form of the speech exists or ever has existed. In the final analysis, since no two persons can speak exactly alike, every person speaks a dialect. We can think of two persons as speaking alike only when, for the sake of harmony, we agree to overlook the differences between them as unimportant. And from this arises the principle that the broad test by which we determine any form of language to be English is that we include it within our circle of linguistic sympathy. We know a word or a construction to be English when we feel it to be a part of our great mother tongue. But our sympathies are not always the same at every moment, and we accept or reject each individual occasion in speech in relation to its own circumstances, that is, on the level of speech to which it appropriately belongs. And finally

in the discussion of the drift of regularity the point was made that much that seems like reasoned order in language is merely the result of instinctive adaptation in the interests of social harmony, often a blind and stultifying social harmony. From these general considerations, we pass now to the more limited, but by no means unimportant question of correctness in speech.

If all persons acted at all times in exactly the same way, the question of correctness and incorrectness would never arise. Only when men differ in their thoughts and their actions do doubts and uncertainty arise. This is no less true in language than in the other perplexities of daily life. Even in the use of our familiar native tongue, our sympathies and our judgments are often divided. The fact of diversity in speech naturally gives rise to many uncertainties and difficulties in the practical use of the language. When several things are possible, it is necessary to make a choice among them. And so in speech, every person from time to time is confronted with the problem of choosing just those practices which he thinks he wants to follow and of rejecting those practices which he thinks should be discarded. This process goes on to a great extent instinctively, but with the more critical it is also a conscious process. With these latter users of the language, various aids are called in to help in arriving at decisions, and among these aids none is more commonly employed than the notion of correctness. Our next task shall be, therefore, to examine just what is meant by this idea of correctness as applied to the use of the English language, and to estimate just what its value is as a guide in the practical use of the language.

From what has already been said, it is apparent that

English may be English, and yet not be correct English. For both correct and incorrect English are constituent elements in the whole of the English language. A person who says Them pipes is too short is unquestionably speaking English. But it is true also that in by far the greater part of our use of the English language, the question of correctness or incorrectness never arises at all. We speak and we write in the main from instinctive habit. These habits are formed by long practice and experience and - have become second nature to us. We do not therefore, speak and write according to rule or law or theory, but for the most part we speak and write as the spirit within us gives us utterance. In the beginning, when we were infants, we were told to do this and to do that, and we were trained by our elders in what our elders thought were the correct habits of speech. But even so we made no conscious choices, and our elders probably made very few. They were intent merely in passing on the body of instinctive speech habits which they themselves had acquired by submissive obedience to the same kind of discipline that now in turn they were exemplifying with their children. Speech that is acquired in this way is almost like the natural bodily functions of breathing or of muscular motion. These acts of speech are performed without question, just as one breathes or moves the hands or feet without asking whether or not one is doing these things correctly.

Questions of correctness in speech are therefore on the whole relatively infrequent, and they arise only when there is present the possibility or the fear of incorrectness. If this possibility or this fear is not present, we go ahead without doubt or hesitation, following no other guide than