A common index to the degree of cultivation in any people is found in their everyday language--their spoken speech; but here again in considering America from the British standpoint we have to be careful or we may be entrapped into the same fallacy as threatens us when we propose to judge the United States by its newspapers. In the first place the right of any people to invent new forms of verbal currency to meet the requirements of its colloquial exchange must be conceded. There was a time when an Americanism in speech was condemned in England because it was American. When so many of the Americanisms of ten years ago are incorporated in the daily speech even of educated Englishmen to-day, it would be affectation to put forward such a plea nowadays. Going deeper than this, we undoubtedly find that the educated Englishman to-day speaks with more precision than the educated American. The educated Englishman speaks the language of what I have already called the public school and university class. But while the Englishman speaks the language of that class, the American speaks the language of the whole people. That is not, of course, entirely true, for there are grades of speech in the United States, but it is relatively true--true for the purpose of a comparison with the conditions in Great Britain. The Englishman may be surprised at the number of solecisms committed in the course of an hour's talk by a well-to-do New Yorker whom he has met in the company of gentlemen in England. He would perhaps be more surprised to find a mechanic from the far West commit no more. The tongue of educated Englishmen is not the tongue of the masses--nor is it a difference in accent only, but in form, in taste, in grammar, and in thought. If in England the well-to-do and gentle classes had commercial transactions only among themselves, it is probable that a currency composed only of gold and silver would suffice for their needs; copper is introduced into the coinage to meet the requirements of the poor. American speech has its elements of copper for the same reason--that all may be able to deal in it, to give and take change in its terms. It is the same fact as we have met before, of the greater homogeneousness of the American people--the levelling power (for want of a better phrase) of a democracy.