Then came a period of great expansion. The really surprising thing is not that the result exhibits some variety but that, when the lapse of time afforded opportunity for, and indeed effected, so much change, when groups widely scattered might so easily have completely lost contact when there was so little external compulsion of any kind to keep even the literary language true to itself, there should have resulted a literary language that is almost uniform and a number of spoken dialects which never become unintelligible one to all the rest. That it has not come about, that every passing day adds to the unlikelihood of its realization, is one of the things that the observer of the ways of language thinks about when he is invited to be very miserable. Clearly, matters are not so bad as they quite easily might have been. But this is speaking in the large.
Excellence is largely a matter of details.
But even in the former case it is proper to ask not only how far uniformity may be possible, but also how far an absolute uniformity, as opposed to something fairly close to it, is really desirable. Few would now feel, as some did in the early days of the Republic, that the dignity of the nation requires that it should have a language entirely its own. More would be ready to assent to the implication of one of our academicians that American usage conform itself as far as possible to the practice of British writers. They made no more effort, that is, than any educated man does who allows his best reading to be reflected in his best writing. The simple fact is that such differences as exist between English in America and English in Britain are not mainly due to ignorance or perversity.