AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE 283 



Finnish and the scattered Yiddish. Not even with this may he be 

 content, although it demand the work of a lifetime and more, but must 

 turn to the east, with its Persian, Armenian, Arabic, Turkish and 

 numerous Hindoo tongues, and then pass on to China and Japan, and 

 even to Korea. 



Who can boast of all this? Yet who will deny that not one nor 

 many, but in truth each and every one, of the intelligent citizens of 

 every nation should have the power of overcoming these linguistic 

 barriers ? This is one of the great needs of the civilized world, as urged 

 in the Prime Minister's address at the Seventeenth Universal Peace 

 Congress held in London, July, 1908 : " I have said it before, but I 

 would say it again, the main thing is that nations should get to know 

 and understand one another." This is profoundly true. Not only the 

 future but the present of these various-tongued races and nations is 

 intertwined to such an extent that the power of free intercommunica- 

 tion is an imperious necessity. But if this direly needed intercourse 

 is so impossible of universal or even fairly general attainment under 

 existing circumstances, another solution must be sought. 



The solution that presents itself next is, that some one of these 

 languages be chosen for universal international use. Next after the 

 mother-tongue, this should be learned by every inhabitant of the civil- 

 ized world, and all publications of any importance whatever should be 

 published directly or in duplicate in this international medium. All 

 international correspondence should be thus conducted, and the lan- 

 guage likewise used in all international assemblies and conventions. 

 To learn one language besides the native tongue would not be so abso- 

 lutely impossible as the absurd idea of learning many or all of them. 

 The proposal is good, and the selection of this language at once becomes 

 a problem worthy of attention, for that one language should serve all 

 nations of the world in international dealings is eminently reasonable. 



The place of a semi-common language among the educated classes 

 was held by Latin in the middle ages, and the mind at once reverts to 

 this, with speculations as to the possibility of its revival. But Latin 

 can not serve this purpose. Its vocabulary is too limited and too 

 unsuitable for discussion of modern themes, since even a bicycle or an 

 umbrella demands circumlocution in Latin, while the introduction of 

 new and modern words would destroy its purity, and make it but a 

 barbarous hodge-podge of Latin forms. Moreover, the difficulties of 

 Latin grammar and syntax prevent this language from being easily 

 mastered. Only at the expense of much time and effort can the modern 

 mind completely assimilate the ancient ways of word-inflection and 

 sentence construction. Any one may admire the purity and severe 

 elegance of Ciceronian Latin, but not every one is able to imitate it. 

 Yet Ciceronian Latin would unhesitatingly be chosen as the standard 

 for a revivification of this tongue. The silver Latinity and that of the 



