his mind an instrument to work with, and be to the race an indispensable help forward in the career of improvement, is to do him a great deal more than justice. This is the way in which in general the powers of man have been drawn out and educated; the art of writing came, in like manner, from attempts at another kind of communication; machines came, one item after another, in the struggle of man to supply his physical needs. We are short-sighted beings, and never able to look more than one step ahead, but we have the power of putting each new step beyond its predecessor, and are surprised by-and-by to see how far we have come, how much we have attained that we had neither expected nor foreseen.
If these views as to language are true, then the marked analogies of languages with institutions are patent and undeniable. A language is a body of usages; it has its main occasion and usefulness in connection with the social life of a community; it is a constituent part of the civilization of its community, worked out, like the rest, by long-continued collision and friction between man and his circumstances, gradually accumulated by the contributions of each member of a race through successive generations, and handed down by a process of teaching and learning. Let a child of European parents be brought at birth into an Indian wigwam, and grow up among Indians only; and his life in all its parts will be Indian—his food, his occupations, his amusements, his knowledge, and his beliefs—and, along with the rest, his language also; while the African, for instance, born and bred in an American community, shows in all these same respects accordance with that particular class of Americans among whom his lot is cast. This by no means implies that there are no such things as race-differences of capacity and disposition, even as there are wide individual differences between members of the same race: the white man makes, perhaps, a somewhat peculiar kind of Indian, the African a peculiar kind of American; yet each acquires the civilization, language included, of the race with which he grows up, and shows his race-characteristics, as they their individual characteristics, inside of that.
All names are imperfect, and have their unsuitable, as well as their suitable suggestiveness in connection with every new object to which they are applied; but I hold, and with the utmost confidence, that there is no general name so truly descriptive of a language as institution—none which takes into account so many of its essential characteristics, or marks so distinctly its place among the possessions of its community. The word, no doubt, offends some, and seems to others derogatory to the dignity of its subject; but I believe that the more the real nature and office of language are understood, and the more established and consistent the linguistic views of the educated become, the more its truth will be acknowledged. I have used it often, partly in a kind of defiance to those views which are decidedly
