I do not think that you Americans and we English are any longer strikingly alike in physical type or general characteristics, no more than I think there is much resemblance between yourselves and the Australians. Our link is now but community of language――_and the infinity which this connotes_. Perfected language――and ours and yours had come to flower before white men began to seek these shores――is so much more than a medium through which to exchange material commodities; it is cement of the spirit, mortar linking the bricks of our thoughts into a single structure of ideals and laws, painted and carved with the rarities of our fancy, the manifold forms of Beauty and Truth. We who speak American and you who speak English are conscious of a community which no differences can take from us. Perhaps the very greatest result of the grim years we have just been passing through is the promotion of our common tongue to the position of the universal language. The importance of the English-speaking peoples is now such that the educated man in every country will perforce, as it were, acquire a knowledge of our speech. The second-language problem, in my judgment, has been solved. Numbers, and geographical and political accident have decided a question which I think will never seriously be reopened, unless madness descends on us and we speakers of English fight among ourselves. That fate I, at least, cannot see haunting the future. Lowell says in one of his earlier writings: “We are the furthest from wishing to see what many are so ardently praying for, namely, a National Literature; for the same mighty lyre of the human heart answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime, and any literature in so far as it is national is diseased in so much as it appeals to some climatic peculiarity rather than to universal nature.” That is very true, but good fortune has now made of our English speech a medium of _internationality_.