The little countries, the pawns and victims of German policy, understand our ideas better.  The peoples who have suffered from tyranny and oppression look to England for help, and it is a generous weakness in us that we sometimes deceive them by our sympathy, for our power is limited, and we cannot help them all.  But it will not count against us at the final reckoning that in most places where humanity has suffered cruelty and indignity the name of England has been invoked:  not always in vain.

And now, for I have kept to the last what I believe to be the greatest gain of all, the entry of America into the War assures the triumph of our common language.  America is peopled by many races; only a minority of the inhabitants—­an influential and governing minority—­are of the English stock.  But here, again, the language carries it; and the ideas that inspire America are ideas which had their origin in the long English struggle for freedom.  Our sufferings in this War are great, but they are not so great that we cannot recognize virtue in a new recruit to the cause.  No nation, in the whole course of human history, has ever made a more splendid decision, or performed a more magnanimous act, than America, when she decided to enter this War.  She had nothing to gain, for, to say the bare truth, she had little to lose.  If Germany were to dominate the world, America, no doubt, would be ruined; but in all human likelihood, Germany’s impious attempt would have spent itself and been broken long before it reached the coasts of America.  America might have stood out of the War in the assurance that her own interests were safe, and that, when the tempest had passed, the centre of civilization would be transferred from a broken and exhausted Europe to a peaceful and prosperous America.  Some few Americans talked in this strain, and favoured a decision in this sense.  But it was not for nothing that America was founded upon religion.  When she saw humanity in anguish, she did not pass by on the other side.  Her entry into the War has put an end, I hope for ever, to the family quarrel, not very profound or significant, which for a century and a half has been a jarring note in the relations of mother and daughter.  And it has put an end to another danger.  It seemed at one time not unlikely that the English language as it is spoken overseas would set up a life of its own, and become separated from the language of the old country.  A development of this kind would be natural enough.  The Boers of South Africa speak Dutch, but not the Dutch spoken in Holland.  The French Canadians speak French, but not the French of Moliere.  Half a century ago, when America was exploring and settling her own country, in wild and lone places, her pioneers enriched the English speech with all kinds of new and vivid phrases.  The tendency was then for America to go her own way, and to cultivate what is new in language at the expense of what is old.  She prided herself even on having a spelling of her own, and seemed almost willing to break loose from tradition and to coin a new American English.