ANTICIPATIONS
arrested altogether. Such novelties as do establish themselves in a locality are widely disseminated almost at once in books and periodicals.
A parallel arrest of dialectic separation has happened in France, in Italy, in Germany, and in the States. It is not a process peculiar to any one nation. It is simply an aspect of the general process that has arisen out of mechanical locomotion. The organisation of elementary education has no doubt been an important factor, but the essential influence working through this circumstance is the fact that paper is relatively cheap to type-setting, and both cheap to authorship—even the commonest sorts of authorship—and the wider the area a periodical or book serves the bigger, more attractive, and better it can be made for the same money. And clearly this process of assimilation will continue. Even local differences of accent seem likely to follow. The itinerant dramatic company, the itinerant preacher, the coming extension of telephones and the phonograph, which at any time in some application to correspondence or instruction may cease to be a toy, all these things attack, or threaten to attack, the weeds of differentiation before they can take root. . . .
And this process is not restricted to dialects merely. The native of a small country who knows no other language than the tongue of his homeland becomes increasingly at a disadvantage in comparison with the user of any of the three great languages of the Europeanised world. For his literature he depends on the scanty writers who are in his own
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