The majority of "Americanisms" in speech were in their origin mere provincialisms--modes of expression and pronunciation which had sprung up unchecked in the isolated communities of a scattered people. They grew with the growth of the communities, until they threatened to graft themselves permanently on the speech of the nation. The United States is no longer a country of isolated and scattered communities. After the Civil War, and partly as a result thereof, but still more as a result of the knitting together of the whole country by the building of the American railway system, with the consequent sudden increase in intimacy of communication between all parts, there developed in the people a new sense of national unity. England saw a revolution in her means of communication when railways superseded stage-coaches and when the penny post was established; but no revolution comparable to that which has taken place in the United States in the present generation. Prior to 1880--really until 1883--Portland, Oregon, was hardly less removed from Portland, Maine, than Capetown is from Liverpool to-day, and the discomforts of travel from one to the other were incomparably greater. Now they are morally closer together than London and Aberdeen, in as much as nowhere between the Atlantic and Pacific is there any such consciousness of racial difference as separates the Scots from the English. The work of federation begun by the original thirteen colonies is not yet completed, for the individuality of the several States is destined to go on being continuously more merged--until it will finally be almost obliterated--in the Federal whole; but it may be said that in the last twenty-five years, and not until then, has the American people become truly unified--an entity conscious of its oneness and of its commercial greatness in that oneness, thinking common thoughts, co-operating in common ambitions, and speaking a common speech. Into that speech were at first absorbed, as has been said, the peculiarities, localisms, and provincialisms which had inevitably grown up in different sections in the days of non-communication. But precisely those same causes--the settlement of the country, the construction of the railways, the development of the natural resources--which contributed to the unification and laid the foundations of the greatness, produced, with wealth and leisure, new ambitions in the people. The desire for art and literature and, what we have called the all-culture, was no new growth, but an instinct inherited from the original English stock. Quickened it must have been by the moral uplifting of the people by the Civil War, but, as we have already seen, for some time after the close of that war the whole energies of the people were necessarily devoted to material things. Only with the completion of the repairing of the ravages of that war, and with the almost coincident settlement of the last great waste