If from names of honour we turn to phrases of honour, we find similar facts. The oriental styles of address, applied to ordinary people—“I am your slave,” “All I have is yours,” “I am your sacrifice”—attribute to the individual spoken to the same greatness that _Monsieur_ and _My Lord_ do: they ascribe to him the character of an {16} all-powerful ruler, so immeasurably superior to the speaker as to be his owner. So, likewise, with the Polish expressions of respect—“I throw myself under your feet,” “I kiss your feet.” In our now meaningless subscription to a formal letter—“Your most obedient servant”—the same thing is visible. Nay, even in the familiar signature “Yours faithfully,” the “yours,” if interpreted as originally meant, is the expression of a slave to his master. All these dead forms were once living embodiments of fact; were primarily the genuine indications of that submission to authority which they verbally assert; were afterwards naturally used by the weak and cowardly to propitiate those above them; gradually grew to be considered the due of such; and, by a continually wider misuse, have lost their meanings, as _Sir_ and _Master_ have done. That, like titles, they were in the beginning used only to the God-king, is indicated by the fact that, like titles, they were subsequently used in common to God and the king. Religious worship has ever largely consisted of professions of obedience, of being God’s servants, of belonging to him to do what he will with. Like titles, therefore, these common phrases of honour had a devotional origin. Perhaps, however, it is in the use of the word _you_ as a singular pronoun that the popularizing of what were once supreme distinctions is most markedly illustrated. This addressing of a single individual in the plural, was originally an honour given only to the highest—was the reciprocal of the imperial “we” assumed by such. Yet now, by being applied to successively lower and lower classes, it has become all but universal. Only by one sect of Christians, and in a few secluded districts, is the primitive _thou_ still used. And the _you_, in becoming common to all ranks, has simultaneously lost every vestige of the distinction once attaching to it.