ANTICIPATIONS
persons thought then, and many who are not in the habit of analysing operating causes, still think to-day, that the wide diffusion of the English-speaking people is a mere preliminary to their political, social, and linguistic disruption—the eighteenth-century breach with the United States is made a precedent of, and the unification that followed the war of Union and the growing unification of Canada is overlooked—that linguistic differences, differences of custom, costume, prejudice, and the like, will finally make the Australian, the Canadian of English blood, the Virginian, and the English Africander, as incomprehensible and unsympathetic one to another as Spaniard and Englishman or Frenchman and German are now. On such a supposition all our current Imperialism is the most foolish defiance of the inevitable, the maddest waste of blood, treasure, and emotion that man ever made. So, indeed, it might be—so, indeed, I certainly think it would be—if it were not that the epoch of post-road and sailing-ship is at an end. We are in the beginning of a new time, with such forces of organisation and unification at work in mechanical traction, in the telephone and telegraph, in a whole wonderland of novel, space-destroying appliances, and in the correlated inevitable advance in practical education, as the world has never felt before.
The operation of these unifying forces is already to be very distinctly traced in the check, the arrest indeed, of any further differentiation in existing tongues, even in the most widely spread. In fact, it is more than an arrest, the forces of differentiation
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