But this did not mean that language was allowed to take care of itself. It was one of the most diligently tended blossoms of human capacity. No word or phrase, whether spontaneous or invented, was allowed to take root without the fiat of the mature community. Language was more a public institution than even government or justice in a people whose every member was able to be a law to himself. It was not only the great channel of communication; it was the medium and garment of every thought. If it became corrupt, how could the mind itself be saved from its contagion? If it acquired a false tone, how could the falsity fail to enter into the very spirit of the men and women? It was the guardian of law and truth; it was the key to the human heart; it was the ether, the medium, in which the human mind lived, moved, and had its being. How could such a potent factor in human progress be left to the caprices of accident, or of single persons, or even of a family? It had more influence over the spirit than all their sciences put together, for it was more universal in its use than any one of them; and it subtly tinged all of them, whilst it was almost the breath of the mind which dealt with them. It might be the life or the poison of the whole race. He who was the sole guide of language would be the master of Limanora, not in the shallow sense of a ruler, but in that of the complete arbiter of its destinies. He would be the despot of the Limanoran mind and might subtly throw it back centuries, if it pleased him. A people so experienced and wise as this would have ruined the whole ideal of their existence if they had allowed the most public of the functions of their civilisation to move at the caprice of individuals. As soon as the purgation of the race had been completed it became plain that their language must be purified too. Hundreds of words and phrases and idioms had had soaked into them the infiltrations of the evil minds which were now banished. Worse than all, language had been the commonest and safest ambush of malignity and deceit; it had been a perpetual trap for the innocent and unwary; it had been a labyrinth, in which even the ablest and purest-minded often lost their way when following the lead of some great and noble thought.