The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of the middle ages, appear to be _glebæ adscriptitiæ_, and to extirpate them, except by extirpating the native race itself, is an almost impossible task. Rome, though she conquered Greece, could not plant her language there. The barbarians who overran the Roman Empire adopted the languages of their new subjects; the Avars and Slavs who settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; the Northmen in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and the Germans in France and northern Italy, as well as the Goths in Spain, conformed to the speech of the tribes they had vanquished. It is asserted, on not very good authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his ear and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but, failing, ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He might as well have ordered his new subjects to walk on their heads. Charles the Fifth, in all the plenitude of his power, could not have compelled all his subjects, Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn his language; he had to learn theirs, though a score in number, as had Charlemagne before him.
England has maintained her dominion in the East for more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek. In the last century, Joseph II, of Austria, issued an edict that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should speak and write one language,--German; but the people recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute. Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more heartily than at the time of their deliverance. The strongest bond of union between the different States of this country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the geographical unity of our territory, but the one common language that is spoken throughout the Republic, from the great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Were different tongues spoken in the different sections of the realm, no wisdom of political structure or sagacity of political administration could hold so many States together amidst such diversities of culture and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our unity of speech,--the common language in which we express our thoughts and feelings, making all friendly and commercial correspondence easy, giving us a common literature, and enabling us to read the same books, newspapers, printed lectures and speeches,--this is like a soul animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles could possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country as various as those of Europe, who does not see that the task of allaying the bitter feeling of hostility at the South, which led to the late outbreak, and of fusing the citizens of the North and of the South into one homogeneous people, would be almost hopeless?