A Brief History Of The English Language

Facing a world "gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased," Stern nurtures his "deep-seated love for the memory of the race of men and women as they had once been." Finally, in the last of the novels, The Afterglow, he establishes a new social system among the other survivors they encounter, a system in which man is free at last because of the elimination of money, the proliferation of scientific thought, and the introduction of the English language, that "magnificent language, so rich and pure," its purity mimicking the racial purity achieved once the "horde" has been "wiped out." More precisely than Burroughs's work, then, England's trilogy occupies the ideology of its era, most familiar in Theodore Roosevelt's claim, from The Winning of the West (1899), that "the -363- spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been…the most striking feature in the world's history." And England's novels exhibit the same contradictions as does Roosevelt's ideal of the "strenuous life," a call away from "overcivilization" that is still a call to "civilize" the world ...»