languages not their own.¹

¹These are some of the actual visible losses owing to the presence of the language difficulty. No one can estimate the value of the losses entailed by the absence of free intercourse due to removable linguistic barriers. Potential (but at present non-realized) extension of goodwill, swifter progress, and wider knowledge represent one side of their value; while consequent non-realized increase in volume of actual business represents their value in money. The negative statement of absence of results from intercourse that never took place affords no measure of positive results obtainable under a better system.

The tendency of those engaged in advancing material progress, which consists in the subjection of nature to man's ends, is to adapt more and more quickly their methods to changing conditions. Has the world yet faced in a business-like spirit the problem of wiping out wastage on words?

Big industrial concerns scrap machinery while it is yet perfectly capable of running and turning out good work, in order to replace it by newer machinery, capable of turning out more work in the same time. Time is money. Can the busy world afford a language difficulty?

(3) The proposition that it is economically sounder to carry on international intercourse in one easy language than in a large number of hard ones rests upon the principle that it does not pay to do a thing a hard way, if the same results can be produced by an easy way.

The whole industrial revolution brought about by the invention of machinery depended upon this principle. Since an artificial language, like machinery, is a means invented by man of furthering his ends, there seems to be no abuse of analogy in comparing them.

When it was found that machinery would turn out a hundred pieces of cloth while the hand-loom turned out one, the hand-loom was doomed, except in so far as it may serve other ends, antiquarian, aesthetic, or artistic, which are not equally well served by machinery. Similarly, to take another revolution which is going on in our own day through a further application of machinery, when it is found that corn can be reaped and threshed by machinery, that hay can be cut, made, carried, and stacked by machinery, that man can travel the high road by machinery, sooner or later machinery is bound to get the bulk of the job, because it produces the same results at greater speed and less cost. So, in the field of international intercourse, if an easy artificial language can with equal efficiency and at less cost produce the same results as a multiplicity of natural ones, in many lines of human activity, and making all reserves in matters antiquarian, aesthetic, and

artistic, sooner or later the multiplicity will have to go to the scrap-heap¹ as cumbrous and out of date. It may be a hundred years; it may be fifty; it may be even twenty. Almost certainly the irresistible trend of economic pressure will work its will and insist that what has to be done shall be done in the most economical way.

¹But only, of course, in those lines in which an international auxiliary language can produce equally good results. This excludes home use, national literature, philology, scholarly study of national languages, etc.

So much, then, for the question of principle. In treating it, certain large assumptions have been made; e.g. it is said above, "if an easy artificial language can with equal efficiency ... produce the same results," etc. Here it is assumed that the artificial language is (1) easy, and (2) that it is possible for it to produce the same results. Again, however easy and possible, its introduction might cost more than it saved. These are questions of fact, and are treated in the three following chapters under the heading of "The Question of Practice."

The man who says a thing is impossible without troubling to find out whether it has been done is merely "talking through his hat," to use an Americanism, and we need not waste much time on him. Any one, who maintains that it is impossible to transact the ordinary business of life and write lucid treatises on scientific and other subjects in an artificial language, is simply in the position of the French engineer, who gave a full scientific demonstration of the fact that an engine could not possibly travel by steam.

The plain fact is that not only one artificial language, but

several, already exist, which not only can express, but already have expressed all the ideas current in social intercourse, business, and serious exposition. It is only necessary to state the facts briefly.

First—Volapük.

Three congresses were held in all for the promotion of this language. The third (Paris, 1889) was the most important. It was attended by Volapükists from many different nations, who carried on all their business in Volapük, and found no difficulty in understanding one another. Besides this, there were a great many newspapers published in Volapük, which treated of all kinds of subjects.

Secondly—Idiom Neutral, the lineal descendant of Volapük.

It is regulated by an international academy, which sends round circulars and does all its business in Idiom Neutral.

Thirdly—Esperanto.

Since the publication of the language in 1887 it has had a gradually increasing number of adherents, who have used it for all ordinary purposes of communication. A great number of newspapers and reviews of all kinds are now published regularly in Esperanto in a great variety of countries. I take up a chance number of the Internacia Scienca Revuo, which happens to be on my table, and find the following subjects among the contents of the month: "Rôle of living beings in the general physiology of the earth," "The carnivorous animals of Sweden," "The part played by heredity in the etiology of chronic nephritis," "The migration of the lemings," "Notices of books," "Notes and correspondence," etc. In fact, the Review has all the appearance of an ordinary scientific periodical, and the articles are as clearly expressed and as easy to read as those in any similar review in a national language.

Even more convincing perhaps, for the uninitiated, is the evidence afforded by the International Congresses of Esperantists. The first was held at Boulogne in August 1905. It marked an epoch in the lives of many of the participants, whose

doubts as to the practical nature of an artificial language there, for good and all, yielded to the logic of facts; and it may well be that it will some day be rather an outstanding landmark in the history of civilization. A brief description will, therefore, not be out of place.

In the little seaport town on the north coast of France had come together men and women of more than twenty different races. Some were experts, some were beginners; but all save a very few must have been alike in this, that they had learnt their Esperanto at home, and, as far as oral use went, had only been able to speak it (if at all) with members of their own national groups—that is, with compatriots who had acquired the language under the same conditions as to pronunciation, etc., as themselves. Experts and beginners, those who from practical experience knew the great possibilities of the new tongue as a written medium, no less than the neophytes and tentative experimenters who had come to see whether the thing was worth taking seriously, they were now to make the decisive