Excerpt from A Literary History of America

Here again we come to a word so simple and so frequent that an important phase of its meaning is often overlooked. Nationality is generally conceived to be a question of race, of descent, of blood, and yet in human experience there is a cir cumstance perhaps more potent in binding men together than any physical tie. That old legend of Babel tells the story. The confusion of tongues broke every bond of common kinship, the races which should hold together through the centuries sprang afresh from men who newly spoke and newly thought and newly felt in terms of common language. For these lan guages which we speak grow more deeply than anything else to be a part of our mental habit who use them. It is in terms of hnguage that we think even about the commonplaces of life, - what we shall eat, what we shall wear, whom we shall care for, in terms of language too, and in no others, we formulate the ideals which consciously, and perhaps still more uncon sciously, guide our conduct and our aspirations. In a strange, subtle way each language grows to associate with itself the ideals and the aspirations and the fate of those peoples with whose life it is inextricably intermingled.

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