in the guards are to the marching regiments as one to eleven:  the number of regiments given to the guards, compared with those given to the line, is about three to one.”—­Junius, p. 147.  Whenever the multitude is spoken of with reference to a personal act or quality, the verb ought, as I before suggested, to be in the plural number; as, “The public are informed.”—­“The plaintiff’s counsel have assumed a difficult task.”—­“The committee were instructed to prepare a remonstrance.”  “The English nation declare they are grossly injured by their representatives.”—­Junius, p. 147.  “One particular class of men are permitted to call themselves the King’s friends.”—­Id., p. 176.  “The Ministry have realized the compendious ideas of Caligula.”—­Id., p. 177.  It is in accordance with this principle, that the following sentences have plural verbs and pronouns, though their definitives are singular, and perhaps ought to be singular:  “So depraved were that people whom in their history we so much admire.”—­HUME:  M’Ilvaine’s Lect., p. 400.  “Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold.”—­Exodus, xxxii, 31. “This people thus gathered have not wanted those trials.”—­Barclay’s Works, i, 460.  The following examples, among others, are censured by Priestley, Murray, and the copyists of the latter, without sufficient discrimination, and for a reason which I think fallacious; namely, “because the ideas they represent seem not to be sufficiently divided in the mind:”—­“The court of Rome were not without solicitude.”—­Hume.  “The house of Lords were so much influenced by these reasons.”—­Id. See Priestley’s Gram., p. 188; Murray’s, 152; R.  C. Smith’s, 129; Ingersoll’s, 248; and others.

OBS. 10.—­In general, a collective noun, unless it be made plural in form, no more admits a plural adjective before it, than any other singular noun.  Hence the impropriety of putting these or those before kind or sort; as, “These kind of knaves I know.”—­Shakspeare.  Hence, too, I infer that cattle is not a collective noun, as Nixon would have it to be, but an irregular plural which has no singular; because we can say these cattle or those cattle, but neither a bullock nor a herd is ever called a cattle, this cattle, or that cattle.  And if “cavalry, clergy, commonalty,” &c., were like this word, they would all be plurals also, and not “substantives which imply plurality in the singular number, and consequently have no other plural.”  Whence it appears, that the writer who most broadly charges others with not understanding the nature of a collective noun, has most of all misconceived it himself.  If there are not many clergies, it is because the clergy is one body, with one Head, and not because it is in a particular sense many.  And, since the forms of words are not necessarily confined to things that exist, who shall say that the plural word clergies, as I have just used it, is not good English?