For the tongue is the representative of the speaker. A people embodies its soul in its language. And the people who inherit English have done work enough in this little world to give them a right to do some talking. They, at least, can speak their boast, and hear it seconded, in the bold accents their mothers taught them, on every shore and on every sea. They have been the world's day-laborers now for some centuries. They have felled its forests, drained its marshes, dug in its mines, ploughed its wastes, built its cities. They have done rough pioneer work over all its surface. They have done it, too, as it never was done before. They have made it _stay done_. They have never given up one inch of conquered ground. They have never yielded back one square foot to barbarism. Won once to civilization, under their leadership, and your square mile of savage waste and jungle is won forever.
We are inclined to think the world might bear with us. We talk a great deal about ourselves, perhaps; but, on the whole, are we not buying the privilege? Did a race ever buckle to its business in this world in more splendid style than our own? With both hands clenched, stripped to the waist, blackened and begrimed and sweat bathed, this race takes its place in the vanguard of the world and bends to its chosen toil. The grand, patient, hopeful people, how they grasp blind brute nature, and tame her, and use her at their word! How they challenge and defeat in the death grapple the grim giants of the waste and the storm--fever, famine, and the frost!
You will find them down, to-day, among the firedamps in the mines, to-morrow among the splendid pinnacles of the mountains, to settle a fact of science, or add a mite to human knowledge. Here is one, painfully toiling through the tangled depths of a desert continent, to find a highway for commerce or Christianity. Here is another, in the lonely seas around the pole, where the ghostly ice-mountains go drifting through the gray mists, patiently wrestling with the awful powers of nature, to snatch its secret from the hoary deep, and bring it home in triumph. Hard fisted, big boned, tough brained, and stout hearted, scared at nothing, beaten back by no resistance, baffled, for long, by no obstacle, this race works as though the world were only one vast workshop, and they wanted all the tools and all the materials, and were anxious to monopolize the work of the world.