Henry Campbell Bannerman's administration, the Trades Disputes Act of 1906, will come in for, I do not say repeal, but certainly severe amendment. Trade Unions and trade unionists were entitled in 1906, in my view, to protection from actions for civil conspiracy in the event of their members going or being called out on strike without breach of contract, on just the same grounds as those on which the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, 1875, under similar circumstances, provided them with protection from prosecutions for criminal conspiracy. It will probably also be conceded by most reasonable people that there was a proper case in 1906 for protecting benefit funds, as distinguished from other trade union funds, from the liability of being taken in execution and so being made liable to satisfy judgment creditors in respect of some claim in no way connected with the benefit part of a Trade Union's business. But, for political motives, the Liberal Government threw over the Report of the Royal Commission on Trades Disputes of 1906. On Feb. 22, 1906, a Trades Disputes Bill was introduced into the House of Commons on behalf of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress (see Public Bills, 1906, No. 32). On March 28, 1906, the Liberal Government introduced their own and very different Bill (see Public Bills, 1906, No. 134). Then the Government abjectly capitulated to the Labour Party and, in the end, the Trades Disputes Act, 1906, as we now know it, was passed. The completeness of the capitulation is obvious from the comparison of the two original Bills with the Act as passed. Lord Birkenhead fitly described (see The Times' of June 23 last) the Liberal Government's surrender:

'Before 1906 no question had arisen in our industrial organisation which deeply interested the country, but owing to the cowardice of the Liberal Government in that year, Parliament had yielded to a menace and had placed on the statute book an Act which was unparalleled for its ineptitude. For the first time in history, those great corporations were placed above the law and were authorised by the law to do deliberately wrongful acts, the results of which might be to involve others in thousands of pounds' worth of damage against which the sufferers would no longer be protected in a court of law.'

In France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and in the United States of America, a trade union exists subject to full civil responsibility for acts committed by it or on its behalf, and there is no exception whatsoever from this rule in respect of acts committed in furtherance or in contemplation of a trade dispute. It is only in Great Britain and in Soviet Russia that trade unions are placed above the law. Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb, in their History of Trade Unionism,' 1920, at p. 606, are moved to offer this shrewd word of caution to their followers: Trade Unionists would be well advised not to presume too far on this apparently absolute immunity from legal proceedings.' The Trade Unions have disregarded this advice and have shown that they are prepared to go to the full extent of their legal immunity, wholly regardless of the suffering and hardship they inflict. One of the immediate duties of Parliament is to remove this abused, unjustifiable, and misused privilege and replace it by full legal responsibility. That is its plain duty to the nation.

LYNDEN MACASSEY.

Art. 9.-AMERICANISMS.

1. The American Language. By H. L. Mencken. Second edition revised. Cape, 1922.

2. Martin Arrowsmith. By Sinclair Lewis. Cape, 1925. 3. Americana, 1925. Edited by H. L. Mencken. Hopkinson, 1925.

4. Midas, or the United States and the Future. By C. H. Bretherton. Kegan Paul, 1926.

5. The English Language in America. By George Philip Krapp. Oxford University Press, 1926.

THE American gentleman who made Martin Chuzzlewit acquainted with Mrs. Hominy explained that he was about to go home by the return train, which starts immediate.' Incidentally, he conveyed the linguistic information, 'Start is not a word you use in your country, sir.' 'Oh yes, it is,' said Martin. You air mistaken, sir,' returned the gentleman, with great decision; but we will not pursue the subject, lest it should awake your prějů-dice.' This scrap of dialogue recurred to my memory on reading some remarks in Mr. Mencken's 'American Language' on the differences between the American and English vocabularies. In & long parallel list we learn inter alia that for American campaign (political), coal, mantel-piece, outbuildings (farm), pay-day, silver (collectively), smoking-room, sweater, the Englishman uses canvass, coals, chimneypiece, offices, wage-day, plate, smoke-room, jersey. We are further told that 'no Englishman ever wears a frock-coat or lives in a bungalow,' when an English business man retires he does not actually retire; he declines business,' 'an Englishman will say that he is seven-and-forty, not that he is forty-seven,' 'they [Englishmen] never run a hotel; they always keep it or manage it,' another word that is improper in America but not in England is tart, a clipped form of sweetheart."

These statements, which, apart from the concluding specimen of etymological erudition, will appear extraordinary to most Englishmen, illustrate the extreme difficulty-one might almost say the impossibility-for an Englishman of learning American or vice versa. It

is perhaps possible, in a lifetime of study and observation, to acquire such a colloquial knowledge of a foreign tongue as to become the possessor of two instruments, each perfect and neither ever influenced by the other; but it is doubtful whether the same end can be attained when it is a question of two slightly differing forms of one and the same language. Mr. Mencken gives copious examples of the blunders committed by English writers, who, after considerable experience of life in the United States, attempt to make their characters speak American:

'Every English author who attempts to render the speech of American characters makes a mess of it. H. G. Wells' American in "Mr Britling sees it through" is only matched by G. K. Chesterton's in "Man Alive" (sic). Even Kipling, who submitted the manuscript of "Captain Courageous" (sic) to American friends for criticism, yet managed to make an American in it say, "He's by way of being a fisherman now."

I have recently noted in an American novel the sentence, 'I hope you don't carry your philosophy that far,' put into the mouth of an English nobleman; while in Miss Willa Cather's 'The Professor's House,' Sir Edgar observes, 'Oh! Then if I had happened along a fortnight ago, I shouldn't have found you here.' In May 1926, a leading American newspaper quoted the opinion of a typical British working-man to the effect that Hif th' miners loose this strike, livin' conditions among the liboring men of Hengland will be worse than ever- Blyme! they're bad enow now.' Mr. Bretherton's 'Midas' is written in English English, but occasionally his speech bewrayeth his long sojourn in the United States. He uses garbage-can and ash-barrel for dustbin, speaks of a 'steady seepage of population from the country to the town,' and of a community which feeds its superfluous population to the crocodiles.'

It seems to be agreed that the word Americanism was coined in 1784 by John Witherspoon, the ScottishAmerican President of Princeton. He explains it as 'an use of phrases or terms, or a construction of sentences, even among persons of rank and education, different from the uses of the same terms and phrases, or the construction of similar sentences, in Great Britain.'

The earliest English author quoted by the 'Oxford
Vol. 247.-No. 489.

K

Dictionary' as using the word is Miss Mitford, who wrote in 'Our Village' (1826), 'Society has been progressing (if I may borrow that expressive Americanism) at a very rapid rate.' It may be observed, en passant, that this use of progress as a verb is one of the many American survivals or revivals of words and senses perfectly familiar in 16th- and 17th-century English.

Although the winning of political independence impelled some American publicists to declare for independence in language, the general tendency of early American writers on the subject is to recognise the identity of their speech with that of the mother-country. The claim has even been made repeatedly that the English spoken in the United States is purer and more correct than that spoken in England. We often hear the same claim put forward by Ulster, Aberdeen, Claybury in the Hole, and other centres of culture. Further, it is asserted by Witherspoon and others that American speech shows a much greater uniformity than English. As recently as 1860, George P. Marsh wrote

'It is a trite observation that, though very few Americans speak as well as the educated class of Englishman, yet not only is the average of English used here, both in speaking and writing, better than that of the great mass of the English people, but there are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of Britain. In spite of disturbing and distracting causes, English is more emphatically one in America than in its native land, and, if we have engrafted on our mother speech some widespread corruptions, we have very nearly freed the language, in our use of it, from some vulgar and disagreeable peculiarities exceedingly common in England.'

The patriotic view of American superiority is also, according to Prof. Krapp, upheld in Mr. Gilbert M. Tucker's recent American English.'

The comments of English writers on the American language are, during the first half of the 19th century, usually disparaging, even venomous. Mrs. Trollope, in her Domestic Manners of the Americans' (1832), tells us that

'Those [Americans] who have chanced to find themselves in the society of the few educated English who have visited