INTERNATIONAL SPEECH 161 



characteristic features of every " natural " language, different in each, 

 and no less difficult in the English than elsewhere. While they give 

 a tongue much of its piquancy, its individuality, they immensely aug- 

 ment the difficulties of its mastery. 



But, finally, there are two fundamental inescapable facts, inherent 

 in the nature of things, which will inevitably make it impossible for 

 any great living tongue — the native language of any people, however 

 powerful and aggressive — to become, in the widest and most real sense 

 of the word, international. First, the essential fact that no single 

 such language, however broad, even the English, contains in its struc- 

 ture, vocabulary and idiom, enough of the elements of international- 

 ity already present and available to make it acceptable to, and easy 

 of acquisition by, all other peoples. In all cases, the use of any single 

 existing language internationally, involves the neglect of valuable, 

 useful, beautiful, skilful forms of speech, possible in each of the 

 others. The second, and perhaps the most serious fundamental ob- 

 stacle exists in the mutual jealousy of nations, and national, pro- 

 vincial pride in one's own language. The experiences of Eussia with 

 Poland and Finland, of Austria with Hungary and Bohemia, of Ger- 

 many with Alsace, are instructive. 



To-day the nationalistic tendency is rampant in every tiny state 

 and dependency in Europe; is fermenting among all the black and 

 brown and yellow peoples over the earth who have heard of Japan's 

 victory over a white race. And as the natural concomitant of this 

 tendency, or indeed often as its main expression, we see dozens of 

 petty dialects, once thought doomed to be swallowed up in a few of 

 the great languages, now not only resisting furiously any such en- 

 gulfment, but aspiring themselves to be great, to be spoken widely 

 over the earth. Instead of Europe, for example, becoming more homo- 

 geneous in language with the development of the great consolidated 

 states, it is apparently becoming more heterogeneous. The Bulgarians 

 would Bulgarize the Balkans, including Macedonia, which the Greeks 

 in turn are equally determined to Hellenize. Eoumania and Servia 

 have developed a national pride of language undreamed of in the 

 seventies. Neither Eussia nor Germany, despite the harshest measures, 

 has succeeded in displacing Polish in its share of the dismembered 

 kingdom. Every patriotic writer in Finland, in Lithuania, in Bohemia, 

 rejects the great " world languages " for Finnish, for Lett, for Czech. 

 Even the Irish are fervently reviving Erse. The Hollanders show no 

 signs of a readiness to abandon Dutch for German, nor do the Wal- 

 loons of Belgium intend to yield to the dominant French of their 

 state. 



As once in the early middle ages, writers in Italy and France, in 

 England and Germany, disdained to express themselves in the com- 



VOL. LXXII. — 11 



