CHAPTER II. 
THE ART OF BREAKING ENGLISH. 
Having shown the means by which the Beach-la-mar came into 
being and was established over a wide extent, we have next to con- 
sider the manner in which the two parties to the transaction arrived 
at an agreement in making the changes, each in his own speech and 
each in the speech of the other, whereby the resultant mongrel of 
language might respond to the calls of the need of each owner. 
Here we are to find two personal equations. We shall have to bear 
in mind that each party to the jargon must of necessity make sacri- 
fices of his own speech down to what he may consider the irreducible 
and ultimate. We shall equally have to bear in mind that there is a 
great difference in the attitude of the civilized man and that of the 
savage, and that, with his assumption of the right to rule the bar- 
barian through white franchise and with his advantage in the pos- 
session of the tawdry wares which to the islander seemsuch treasures, 
the white man must be the directive force in this creation of a speech 
which shall become common. 
Of peculiar incidence upon the speaker of English, we must not 
neglect to recognize one supreme axiom of international philology: 
the proper way to make a foreigner understand what you would say 
is to use broken English. He speaks it himself, therefore give him 
what he uses. 
“Then we give them the shoot gun,’ says Xury, laughing, ‘make 
them run wey’; such English he spoke by conversing among us 
slaves.’’ This we owe to Robinson Crusoe. 
In Bleeding Heart Yard we shall find the principle developed in 
richer detail; and the extracts, while long, will prove valuable. 
Each in his own way, Dickens and Defoe were observers particularly 
alert in the walk of the common life. 
It was up-hill work for a foreigner, lame or sound, to make his way with 
the Bleeding Hearts. In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded that 
every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it to be a 
sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to his own 
country. They never thought of inquiring how many of their own country- 
men would be returned upon their hands from divers parts of the world if 
the principle were generally recognized; they considered it practically and 
peculiarly British. In the third place, they had a notion that it was a sort 
of divine visitation upon a foreigner that he was not an Englishman, and 
that all kinds of calamities happened te his country because it did things 
that England did not, and did not do things that England did. * * 
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