An American was one day asked by a cutlery salesman from Birmingham (England), "Are you not humiliated by having no national language?" "We have one," was the prompt reply; "it is English." So would have spoken a Canadian or a Newfoundlander, a South African, a New Zealander, or an Australian. That is one of our prides. Our language is ours. It reflects our many-rooted origins, our varied and severally branched histories, our constantly converging growths. It binds us to the ideals of our kind. Its very name takes us in imagination to the infancy of our race, where {40} from subservience to the wills of others the individual emerged. "The English have given importance to individuals, a principal end and fruit of every society. Every man is allowed and encouraged to be what he is, and is guarded in the indulgence of his whim. 'Magna Charta,' said Rushworth, 'is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.' By this general activity and by this sacredness of individuals, they have in seven hundred years evolved the principles of freedom. It is the land of patriots, martyrs, sages and bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged should wash it away, it will be remembered as an island famous for immortal laws, for the announcement of original right which make the stone tables of liberty."[40-1] To acknowledge the relation of America to the land of these struggles and their earliest successes can never be humiliating. England's past belongs to us all, and to-day England is one of us. There, was cradled the individualism of our Teuton forbears that has grown into a civilizing world-wide domination. We all have helped to nurture and shield it. We are as seven guardians whose harmony is secured not only because they are one in aim and method but because being one in language they are bound into understanding. The Pan-Angle enjoys the highest standard of living known to any comparable number of people in the world, either formerly or to-day. If civilization depends on the margin of wealth above mere {41} means of existence, Pan-Angles are the most civilized of the races.