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PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 
Proposition III.—In the case of the Greek language, while the internal 
conservative influences were peculiarly strong, the external were loose and vari- 
able. An absolute political cohesion in the Roman style the Greeks never 
had. Variety by expansion, and dispersion, and consolidation round a number 
of special social nuclei, was during their most brilliant period the law of their 
external growth; but during this period, the influence, first, of an Ionic minstrelsy 
in Asia Minor, and then of an Attic culture in south-eastern Europe, was so 
strong that it controlled in a very imperial fashion the separative and par- 
ticularising forces of independent political centres; and afterwards, when a 
strong central government was established, and continued for many centuries 
at Constantinople, this unifying influence, acting with the double power of 
Church and State, though disturbed at first by the intrusion of a strong Roman 
vein, combined, with an unexampled weight of intellectual and moral tradition, 
to retard and impede, or practically to ignore, the changes which, by a pro- 
cess of nature, were naturally going on in the Greek language, in an increasing 
ratio, from the overthrow of the political and intellectual supremacy of Athens 
by the Macedonians, to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, and from 
that time by natural propagation, though with diminished force, up to the 
present hour. 
Proposition [V.—These retarding forces, however, being in a manner arti- 
ficial, and acting contrary to the natural law of variation by growth, are neces- 
sarily limited in their operation, and can, of course, act only where they are felt ; 
that is to say, in those classes of society which are kept constantly under the 
moulding and controlling influence of the inherited traditions of the past ; or, 
in common language, in the well-educated classes of the community. The 
uneducated classes, on the contrary, by whom the controlling power of this 
traditional culture is not felt, or felt only indirectly and with greatly diminished 
force, go on, partly breaking down old forms of speech, partly sending forth 
new shoots, so as to form what becomes a distinctly marked dialect of their 
own; and in this way the language of a whole people in a state of imperfect 
and inadequate culture may be propagated in two distinct parallel lines, like 
an upper and a lower stratum in geology, without coalescing into any common 
type. 
Proposition V.—This bistratified condition of a spoken language is exactly 
what we find realised in the capital of the Byzantine Empire at the time of the 
Crusades. For here, while a remarkably strong and unbroken chain of literary 
and ecclesiastical tradition had preserved, with very trivial alterations, the 
Catholic dialect of the Greek language, of which Attic is the most finished 
type, the gradual disintegration of anill-governed empire had combined with 
