ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD: ORIGINS, EX PANSION, RELATIONS AND PROSPECT. The following pages divide into nine sections:—I. Origins up to I 6o6 : the island, its breeds and the language. II. First expansion in the i 7th century: Puritanism and Sea-Power. III. 1674-1782 : Mak ing and breaking of the Old Empire. IV. After 1782: Britain's vitality. V. Ireland's increase, disaster and exodus overseas. VI. 179o-1928: Growth and transformation of the United States. VII. A general view of English-speaking life. VIII. "Towards 300,000,000" : the future and its problems. IX. Conditions of Moral unity and parallel action: the "Key of the World." When Shakespeare and the Authorized Bible revealed the in comparable resources of expression attained by one modern language, its speakers were still but a small handful of the human family; and nearly all local to a peculiar nook of ground. Nothing augured the destinies of their tongue. Then, it was used by little more than 5,000,000 persons altogether. To-day, multi plied forty-fold in a short period of historic time, it is the principal world-language; already familiarly spoken by about 200,000,000 people and sure of large increase. Then, though its seafaring epic had just begun, it was still confined almost entirely to one island broken off narrowly from the continental mass of Europe. Now, this language, and this only, has been carried through all the oceans and spread round the globe. The results have appeared in our day as a paramount force of world history. With political and social diversities of every kind, widely separated communities have speech and literature in common; their general conceptions of freedom and law and ethics are the same. The relations of this vast array of lands and peoples are of unsurpassable moment.
"Language" and "Race."—The growth of the English-speaking world is more often marvelled at than understood as a process of historical geography. At no phase can it be explained by dwelling in the older way, with almost exclusive emphasis upon the "Anglo Saxon idea." From that standpoint only, the biggest develop ments and the future problems cannot be realized at all. Lan guage and race may be two very different elements in combination. There is no such thing known as a "pure" unmixed breed. Every great language covers more or less a variety of racial origins. This is a principal key to modern historical work. None the less is England the mother of nations—a "little England," indeed, but a mighty mother.
The 'rudiments of our modern'world-tongue had not reached the country destined to receive and transform them. Then from the fifth to the tenth centuries, "English-speaking expansion" began as a new colonization of the island—like a miniature America—by north European tribes. By successive waves the Germanic and Norse invaders—Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and later Scandinavians—swept in and changed utterly the breed and speech of the larger part of the land which had been Britain; while, in the latter centuries of this period, the swoops and settlements of the Vikings came round to Ireland and though in the end less successful there had a far-reaching influence on its future. The terms "England" and "English" do not come into use for a long time. First, towards A.D. 100o under the Danish domination, they seem to have implied as against the new invaders, a common consciousness of the Anglo-Saxons formerly at feud with one another. Secondly, and very soon (A.D. io66) from the Norman conquest onwards, "English" took in the Danes as well, against the new masters. For a generation or two, by distinction, the Normans of the ruling caste even though born in England called themselves "French." This caste itself sprang from no pure Norman aristocracy as supposed in centuries afterwards by the vanity of their real and fictitious descendants, but mainly from a medley of adventurers syndicated for profit and drawn to the Duke's banner by his wide advertisement of expected spoil. William's host was a Joint Stock company in armour. The con sequences are in the life and language of America to-day no less than in the substance and soul of the original islands.
Late Creation of English: the Newest Modern Language. —Though "English" had been a name in use for a couple of generations before the Battle of Hastings, as yet the tongue we mean by it was not. It was gradually, wonderfully shaped, in the next five centuries from the Conquest to Elizabeth. Chaucer shows change and enrichment advanced more than mid-way. Words from the French swell the vocabulary. This digestive habit easily leads under the Renaissance to ample assimilation of Latin forms. Thus we acquired the present inheritance of all the English speaking and English-writing communities—a medium capable of magnificence, power, subtlety, but of all homeliness, humour, tenderness; full of practical force. It kept a great simplicity in inmost nerve and character, and controlling elements. For all the splendour, you have mostly words of one syllable in: "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" Bunyan writes line after line in words of one syllable. But Shakespeare suggests in one sentence the whole range and blend ing and depth of tone, of this orchestra: ". . . Not poppy nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep • Which thou ow'dst yesterday. . ." Burke breathes eternal regret : "What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue." Wordsworth spiritualizes a loveliness of imagination : "The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream." And an Abraham Lincoln creates the Gettysburg speech where the eloquence of a prose, brief, pure and immortal, remains even after the World War the utterance in modern centuries most worthy of great nations remembering their dead. But the book of books, the English-speakers carried with them when they began to spread overseas was the Bible in the Authorized Version, chief treasury of the language containing all the qualities remarked upon above, and others of its own: "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made : marvellous are thy works." Note that since Alfred's day the immense growth by verbal immigration of the language itself while yet local only, was like a premonition of the subsequent expansion and assimilativeness of the race. Another thing was preparative. The English them selves were of mixed Germanic-Celtic blood representing racial elements as different at first as say Swede and Slav in the present white population of the United States. As Sir Walter Scott puts it, Scottish Lowlanders for long regarded Gaelic Highlanders much as Pennsylvanian settlers used to regard Cherokees.
The First Five Millions; and the Larger Rivals.—Thus much for things as they had come to be when the great dispersion began. Estimates of the population of England at the time of the Conquest vary and are all very uncertain. The likeliest number in io66 is given as about 1,500,000. There is no more certainty about whether the rate of increase afterwards in the middle ages was fairly good or very slow. There seems no doubt that the Black Death (1348-5o) meant a heavy throwback though the chronicles exaggerate. Whether one third of the people disap peared or but one tenth (the lowest reckoning) we do not know. But it is probable that in the century and a half between the great pestilence and the height of the Elizabethan period the population doubled itself and increased as much in prosperity. It is thought to have numbered, however, only about 5,000,000 in Scotland at the same time there may have been not much more than half a million of English speakers and in Ireland less than ioo,000—when Queen Elizabeth died in 1603.
What were the chances of the insular five millions in the coming struggle of nations in the i 7th century for sea-power and colonies? To almost any foreign eye at that time, the chances would not seem considerable. The power of Spain though somewhat past its zenith seemed immense in both hemispheres. The French were already about i 6,000,000 strong, over three times as numerous as the English and increasing faster. The Dutch were going far ahead, as for long they were to continue, in maritime and mer cantile progress. The English until rather recently had not even begun to be in the forefront of navigation and world-adventure though the discovery of America was destined in the very end to have greater consequences for them and their posterity than for all other nations put together. When Shakespeare went to school there had been nothing to compare with the achievements of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magelhaens or Jacques Cartier. John Cabot was a Genoese though he sailed for the English King. For over two generations after that discovery of Newfoundland nothing much happened. True that a few English fishermen made the Atlantic passage more or less regularly to fish like others on "the banks." That, in a way, was a small beginning of the expansion but there was still no settlement. Then the epic opened when Drake went round the world and Sir Humphrey Gilbert with far larger though dreamy political ideas, the real pioneer of the English-speaking world overseas, obtained in his general patent of colonization. In June 1583 he with his intending colonists sailed from Plymouth for Newfoundland— "which was but 700 leagues from our English coast." He took formal possession and set up a pillar on which were engraved the arms of England. But ill-luck dogged him. After 17 days, he had to sail away again leaving nothing but the pillar behind him. He declared that they would all return "royally in the Spring." But he perished in his little "Squirrel"—io tons!—having been heard in the storm to say a word that was to be in the future the soul of more than he knew : "We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land." Raleigh followed. The "growing spots" were not to be in Newfoundland but amidst more favourable scenes on the Atlantic coast of the American mainland. In the year after Gilbert went down, "Virginia" received its name but by no means its being. For more than two decades yet attempts at "plantation" would not root ; but neither, now, would the dream die.