INTERNATIONAL SPEECH 153 



THE PROBLEM OF INTERNATIONAL SPEECH 



By ANNA MONSCH ROBERTS 

 MANHATTAN, KANS. 



TO any thoughtful student of affairs, it is perfectly clear that, as 

 the years go by, all the nations of the earth must inevitably be- 

 come more and more closely linked together in all their interests. The 

 present highly perfected modes of communication will become greatly 

 improved and vastly extended. All the economic and material com- 

 mercial, as well as all the intellectual interests of each people will 

 become of increasing significance to every other one. National bound- 

 aries will, in the lapse of time, become of as purely formal, merely 

 administrative importance as are our American state and county 

 boundaries to-day. Already in The Hague tribunal we have the be- 

 ginnings of an international supreme court. In time the United 

 States of Europe is a conceivable possibility, with abolished frontiers 

 and armies reduced to police forces. Commerce and industry are 

 certain to end the folly and barbarism of war; since the rise to self- 

 consciousness of the working classes (who fill the armies) will make 

 their community of interest the world over plain to themselves, and 

 they will see that to hire themselves out to kill one another is a crime 

 to common humanity. 



One prime obstacle to that clear and perfect understanding among 

 human minds everywhere over the broad earth lies in their inability 

 fully to comprehend one another's thoughts and purposes, because of 

 the diversity of tongues. That this is a very serious obstacle to hu- 

 man progress and the development of the globe, becomes increasingly 

 evident the more readily and easily possible communication by mail, 

 telegraph and actual travel becomes. So long as the different peoples 

 read little, wrote less, and traveled scarcely at all, the polyglot con- 

 dition of the world was a matter of little interest. To-day it has risen 

 to be a most serious hindrance and inconvenience to the steps of ad- 

 vancing humanity. It is true that almost all educated persons feel 

 impelled to-day to attempt the learning of other languages than their 

 own, if only to come in touch with the civilized world's literature, 

 aside from the ordinary practical considerations. Sometimes this feel- 

 ing petrifies into the pious attitude ironically commended by Lord 

 Palmerston, who said that while it was not necessary that every 

 gentleman should know Latin, he should at least have forgotten it. 



It is trite and easy to say that this is a scientific age, but one must 

 actually have worked in some field of science to realize the blunder- 



