As with individuals, so with nations: the language of a people is often a moral barometer, which marks with marvellous precision the rise or fall of the national life. The stock of words composing any language corresponds to the knowledge of the community that speaks it, and shows with what objects it is familiar, what generalizations it has made, what distinctions it has drawn,--all its cognitions and reasonings, in the worlds of matter and of mind. “As our material condition varies, as our ways of life, our institutions, public and private, become other than they have been, all is necessarily reflected in our language. In these days of railroads, steamboats and telegraphs, of sun pictures, of chemistry and geology, of improved wearing stuffs, furniture, styles of building, articles of food and luxury of every description, how many words and phrases are in every one’s mouth which would be utterly unintelligible to the most learned man of a century ago, were he to rise from his grave and walk our streets!... Language is expanded and contracted in precise adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those who use it; it is enriched or impoverished, in every part, along with the enrichment or impoverishment of their minds.”[7] Every race has its own organic growth, its own characteristic ideas and opinions, which are impressed on its political constitution, its legislation, its manners and its customs, its modes of religious worship; and the expression of all these peculiarities is found in its speech. If a people is, as Milton said of the English, a noble and a puissant nation, of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent and subtle to discourse, its language will exhibit all these qualities; while, on the other hand, if it is frivolous and low-thoughted,--if it is morally bankrupt and dead to all lofty sentiments,--its mockery of virtue, its inability to comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the feebleness of its moral indignation, will all inevitably betray themselves in its speech, as truly as would the opposite qualities of spirituality of thought and exaltation of soul. These discreditable qualities will find an utterance “in the use of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively trivial or even ridiculous; in the squandering of such as ought to have been reserved for the highest mysteries of the spiritual life, on slight and secular objects; and in the employment, almost in jest and play, of words implying the deepest moral guilt.”