property of a class. Thus there come to exist among the same people two separate tongues; the one, an inheritance from the past, becoming ever more stiff and constrained, and employable only for special uses; the other, the production of the present, growing constantly more unlike the other by the operation of the ordinary processes of linguistic change; full of inaccuracies and corruptions, if we choose to call them so, but also full of healthy and vigorous life, which enables it finally to over-throw and replace the learned dialects of which it is the offspring. Such has been the origin and such the fate of all the learned dialects which, in various parts of the world, have been preserved as ‘dead languages,’ for the purposes of learned communication, after losing their character as the vernacular speech of a community; for instance, the ancient Egyptian, long kept up for sacred uses, and written in the hieroglyphic signs, after both language and letters had in popular use taken on another form; the Zend, in the keeping of the ministers of Zoroaster’s doctrine; the Sanskrit, even yet taught in the Brahmanic schools of India, amid the Babel of modern dialects, its descendants; the Latin, the common language of the educated through all Europe, for centuries during which the later forms of Romanic speech, now the vehicles of a culture superior to that of Greece and Rome, were mere barbarous patois. Every dialect which is made the subject of literary culture is liable to the fate of the Latin; aristocracy and exclusiveness tend to final over throw, in language as in politics; the needs and interests of the many are more important than those of the few, and must in the end prevail. True Linguistic conservatism consists in establishing an educated and virtuous democracy, in enlisting the whole community, by a means of thorough and pervading education, in the proper and healthy preservation of the accepted usages of correct speech and then in letting whatever change must and will come, take its course. There is a purism which, while it seeks to maintain the integrity of
