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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands
whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains
still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the
other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show
in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-
speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller
through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea
Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the
ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home
country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition. You may
go all over the States, and - setting aside the actual intrusion
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