11 



how vast the responsibility of the great author of the future, who will 

 have for an audience possibly half the world ! I think also that 

 within the range of this common language, there may be room for 

 a great diversity of spoken dialects, all leading up by graduated 

 lines to the one common centre. Whenever that far distant time 

 shall come of which I have ventured to speak, it may find the old 

 country far surpassed in population, in wealth, and in material 

 resources, by the younger and more unfettered races to whom she 

 has given birth. But it will find her, let us venture to beUeve, 

 still the great centre of civilising influences, still the honoured 

 mother of mighty nations, and the parent of great and free 

 institutions. 



