no sex are neuter; and there an end. English is eminently a language of common sense; and one marked evidence of this trait is its freeing itself entirely from the nuisance of grammatical gender along with other grammatical trammels.[2] It has _freed_ itself from those trammels; for at one time it was hampered by them sorely. Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, was an inflected speech, and was tied up in the bonds of gender and other grievous grammatical tetherings. This was long ago; but it was after Britain had become England, or Engle-land, the land of the English people and of English speech. When our English forefathers were little better than semi-savages, bloody, barbarous, heathen, worshiping Thor and Woden, and in a state of benighted ignorance of which it would be difficult for those of my readers who have not tried to pierce the darkness of that historical past to form even an approximate notion—at this time, and in this social and intellectual condition of the speakers of the English language, it was copiously provided with grammar. Even Greek had not much the better of it in this respect. It had not only forms for person and number, but gender forms, and cases galore.[3] Take, for example, a word which was English a thousand years ago, just as it is to-day, _man_. This simple word has undergone no change in all the thousand years, unless by losing a little breadth of sound; it having probably been pronounced _mahn_, of which sound the rustic _mon_ of provincial England is a relic and representative. But _man_ could not be used pure and simple, under all circumstances and in all cases, in the English of that day any more than, as we have seen, _mater_ and _bonus_ could be so used in Latin. There was the nominative singular—_man_, simply; the genitive _mannes_—of a man; the dative _men_, to or for a man; accusative _mannan_—a man objectively; nominative plural _men_; genitive _manna_—of men, or men’s; and a dative _mannum_—to or for men.