What has been here affirmed concerning our provincial English, namely that it is often _old_ English rather than _bad_ English, may be affirmed with equal right of many so-called Americanisms. There are parts of America where ‘het’ is used, or was used a few years since, as the perfect of ‘to heat’; ‘holp’ as the perfect of ‘to help’; ‘stricken’ as the participle of ‘to strike’. Again there are the words which have become obsolete during the last two hundred years, which have not become obsolete there, although many of them probably retain only a provincial existence. Thus ‘slick’, which indeed is only another form of ‘sleek’, was employed by our good writers of the seventeenth century{148}. Other words again, which have remained current on both sides of the Atlantic, have yet on our side receded from their original use, while they have remained true to it on the other. ‘Plunder’ is a word in point{149}. In the contemplation of facts like these it has been sometimes asked, whether a day will ever arrive when the language spoken on this side of the Atlantic and on the other, will divide into two languages, an old English and a new. We may confidently answer, No. Doubtless, if those who went out from us to people and subdue a new continent, had left our shores two or three centuries earlier than they did, when the language was very much farther removed from that ideal after which it was unconsciously striving, and in which, once reached, it has in great measure acquiesced; if they had not carried with them to their distant homes their English Bible, and what else of worth had been already uttered in the English tongue; if, having once left us, the intercourse between Old and New England had been entirely broken off, or only rare and partial; there would then have unfolded themselves differences between the language spoken here and there, which in tract of time accumulating and multiplying, might in the end have justified the regarding of the languages as no longer one and the same. It could not have failed but that such differences should have displayed themselves; for while there is a law of _necessity_ in the evolution of languages, while they pursue certain courses and in certain directions, from which they can be no more turned aside by the will of men than one of the heavenly bodies could be pushed from its orbit by any engines of ours, there is a law of _liberty_ no less; and this liberty must inevitably have made itself in many ways felt. In the political and social condition of America, so far removed from our own, in the many natural objects which are not the same with those which surround us here, in efforts independently carried out to rid the language of imperfections, or to unfold its latent powers, even in the different effects of soil and climate on the organs of speech, there would have been causes enough to have provoked in the course of time not immaterial divergencies of language.