How is it with the alternation of subjective and objective in the pronoun?  Granted that whom is a weak sister, that the two cases have been leveled in you (in it, that, and what they were never distinct, so far as we can tell[141]), and that her as an objective is a trifle weak because of its formal identity with the possessive her, is there any reason to doubt the vitality of such alternations as I see the man and the man sees me?  Surely the distinction between subjective I and objective me, between subjective he and objective him, and correspondingly for other personal pronouns, belongs to the very core of the language.  We can throw whom to the dogs, somehow make shift to do without an its, but to level I and me to a single case—­would that not be to un-English our language beyond recognition?  There is no drift toward such horrors as Me see him or I see he.  True, the phonetic disparity between I and me, he and him, we and us, has been too great for any serious possibility of form leveling.  It does not follow that the case distinction as such is still vital.  One of the most insidious peculiarities of a linguistic drift is that where it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it innocuous by washing the old significance out of it.  It turns its very enemies to its own uses.  This brings us to the second of the major drifts, the tendency to fixed position in the sentence, determined by the syntactic relation of the word.

[Footnote 141:  Except in so far as that has absorbed other functions than such as originally belonged to it.  It was only a nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.]

We need not go into the history of this all-important drift.  It is enough to know that as the inflected forms of English became scantier, as the syntactic relations were more and more inadequately expressed by the forms of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradually took over functions originally foreign to it. The man in the man sees the dog is subjective; in the dog sees the man, objective.  Strictly parallel to these sentences are he sees the dog and the dog sees him.  Are the subjective value of he and the objective value of him entirely, or even mainly, dependent on the difference of form?  I doubt it.  We could hold to such a view if it were possible to say the dog sees he or him sees the dog.  It was once possible to say such things, but we have lost the power.  In other words, at least part of the case feeling in he and him is to be credited to their position before or after the verb.  May it not be, then, that he and him, we and us, are not so much subjective and objective forms as pre-verbal and post-verbal[142] forms, very much as my and mine are now