Part 16 (1/2)

It has often happened that what the French think to-day the world generally thinks to-morrow. There is probably a world-wide significance in the fact that French experience is held to show that progress in intelligence means the demoralization of the army.

[229] The influence of Syndicalism has, however, already reached the English Labour Movement, and an ill-advised prosecution by the English Government must have immensely aided in extending and fortifying that influence.

[230] Some small beginnings have already been made. ”The greatest gain ever yet won for the cause of peace,” writes Mr. H.W. Nevinson, the well-known war correspondent (_Peace and War in the Balance_, p. 47), ”was the refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco in July, 1909.... So Barcelona flared to heaven, and for nearly a week the people held the vast city. I have seen many n.o.ble, as well as many terrible, events, but none more n.o.ble or of finer promise than the sudden uprising of the Catalan working people against a dastardly and inglorious war, waged for the benefit of a few speculators in Paris and Madrid.”

[231] J. Novikov, _Le Federation de l'Europe_, chap. iv. Olive Schreiner, _Woman and Labour_, chap. IV. While this is the fundamental fact, we must remember that we cannot generalize about the ideas or the feelings of a whole s.e.x, and that the biological traditions of women have been a.s.sociated with a primitive period when they were the delighted spectators of combats. ”Woman,” thought Nietzsche, ”is essentially unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have a.s.sumed the peaceable demeanour.” Steinmetz (_Philosophie des Krieges_, p. 314), remarking that women are opposed to war in the abstract, adds: ”In practice, however, it happens that women regard a particular war--and all wars are particular wars--with special favour”; he remarks that the majority of Englishwomen fully shared the war fever against the Boers, and that, on the other side, he knew Dutch ladies in Holland, very opposed to war, who would yet have danced with joy at that time on the news of a declaration of war against England.

[232] The general strike, which has been especially developed by the syndicalist Labour movement, and is now tending to spread to various countries, is a highly powerful weapon, so powerful that its results are not less serious than those of war. To use it against war seems to be to cast out Beelzebub by Beelzebub. Even in Labour disputes the modern strike threatens to become as serious and, indeed, almost as sanguinary as the civil wars of ancient times. The tendency is, therefore, in progressive countries, as we see in Australia, to supersede strikes by conciliation and arbitration, just as war is tending to be superseded by international tribunals. These two aims are, however, absolutely distinct, and the introduction of law into the disputes between nations can have no direct effect on the disputes between social cla.s.ses. It is quite possible, however, that it may have an indirect effect, and that when disputes between nations are settled in an orderly manner, social feeling will forbid disputes between cla.s.ses to be settled in a disorderly manner.

[233] The Abbe de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), a churchman without vocation, was a Norman of n.o.ble family, and first published his Memoires pour rendre la Paix Perpetuelle a l'Europe in 1722. As Siegler-Pascal well shows (Les Projets de l'Abbe de Saint-Pierre, 1900) he was not a mere visionary Utopian, but an acute and far-seeing thinker, practical in his methods, a close observer, an experimentalist, and one of the first to attempt the employment of statistics. He was secretary to the French plenipotentiaries who negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht, and was thus probably put on the track of his scheme. He proposed that the various European states should name plenipotentiaries to form a permanent tribunal of compulsory arbitration for the settlement of all differences. If any state took up arms against one of the allies, the whole confederation would conjointly enter the field, at their conjoint expense, against the offending state. He was opposed to absolute disarmament, an army being necessary to ensure peace, but it must be a joint army composed of contingents from each Power in the confederation.

Saint-Pierre, it will be seen, had clearly grasped the essential facts of the situation as we see them to-day. ”The author of The Project of Perpetual Peace” concludes Prof. Pierre Robert in a sympathetic summary of his career (Pet.i.t de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature Francaise, Vol. VI), ”is the precursor of the twentieth century.” His statue, we cannot doubt, will be a conspicuous object, beside Sully's, on the future Palace of any international tribunal.

[234] Jules de Gaultier, ”Comment Naissent les Dogmes,” Mercure de France, 1st Sept., 1911. Jules de Gaultier also observes that ”conflict is the law and condition of all existence.” That may be admitted, but it ceases to be true if we a.s.sume, as the same thinker a.s.sumes, that ”conflict” necessarily involves ”war.” The establishment of law to regulate the disputes between individuals by no means suppresses conflict, but it suppresses fighting, and it ensures that if any fighting occur the aggressor shall not profit by his aggression. In the same way the existence of a tribunal to regulate the disputes between national communities of individuals can by no means suppress conflict; but unless it suppresses fighting, and unless it ensures that if fighting occurs the aggressor shall not profit by his aggression, it will have effected nothing.

[235] A.L. Guerard, ”Impressions of Military Life in France,” _Popular Science Monthly_, April, 1911.

XI

THE PROBLEM OF AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE

Early Attempts to Construct an International Language--The Urgent Need of an Auxiliary Language To-day--Volapuk--The Claims of Spanish--Latin--The Claims of English--Its Disadvantages--The Claims of French--Its Disadvantages--The Modern Growth of National Feeling opposed to Selection of a Natural Language--Advantages of an Artificial Language--Demands it must fulfil--Esperanto--Its Threatened Disruption--The International a.s.sociation for the adoption of an Auxiliary International Language--The First Step to Take.

Ever since the decay of Latin as the universal language of educated people, there have been attempts to replace it by some other medium of international communication. That decay was inevitable; it was the outward manifestation of a movement of individualism which developed national languages and national literatures, and burst through the restraining envelope of an authoritarian system expounded in an official language. This individualism has had the freest play, and we are not likely to lose all that it has given us. Yet as soon as it was achieved the more distinguished spirits in every country began to feel the need of counterbalancing it. The history of the movement may be said to begin with Descartes, who in 1629 wrote to his friend Mersenne that it would be possible to construct an artificial language which could be used as an international medium of communication. Leibnitz, though he had solved the question for himself, writing some of his works in Latin and others in French, was yet all his life more or less occupied with the question of a universal language. Other men of the highest distinction--Pascal, Condillac, Voltaire, Diderot, Ampere, Jacob Grimm--have sought or desired a solution to this problem.[236] None of these great men, however, succeeded even in beginning an attempt to solve the problem they were concerned with.

Some forty years ago, however, the difficulty began again to be felt, this time much more keenly and more widely than before. The spread of commerce, the facility of travel, the ramifications of the postal service, the development of new nationalities and new literatures, have laid upon civilized peoples a sense of burden and restriction which could never have been felt by their forefathers in the previous century.

Added to this, a new sense of solidarity had been growing up in the world; the financial and commercial solidarity, by which any disaster or disturbance in one country causes a wave of disaster or disturbance to pa.s.s over the whole civilized globe, was being supplemented by a sense of spiritual solidarity. Men began to realize that the tasks of civilization cannot be carried out except by mutual understanding and mutual sympathy among the more civilized nations, that every nation has something to learn from other nations, and that the bonds of international intercourse must thus be drawn closer. This feeling of the need of an international language led in America to several serious attempts to obtain a consensus of opinion among scientific men regarding an international language. Thus in 1888 the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, the oldest of American learned societies, unanimously resolved, on the initiative of Brinton, to address a letter to learned societies throughout the world, asking for their co-operation in perfecting a language for commercial and learned purposes, based on the Aryan vocabulary and grammar in their simplest forms, and to that end proposing an international congress, the first meeting of which should be held in Paris or London. In the same year Horatio Hale read a paper on the same subject before the American a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science. A little later, in 1890, it was again proposed at a meeting of the same a.s.sociation that, in order to consider the question of the construction and adoption of a symmetrical and scientific language, a congress should be held, delegates being in proportion to the number of persons speaking each language.

These excellent proposals seem, however, to have borne little fruit. It is always an exceedingly difficult matter to produce combined action among scientific societies even of the same nation. Thus the way has been left open for individuals to adopt the easier but far less decisive or satisfactory method of inventing a new language by their own unaided exertions. Certainly over a hundred such languages have been proposed during the past century. The most famous of these was undoubtedly Volapuk, which was invented in 1880 by Schleyer, a German-Swiss priest who knew many languages and had long pondered over this problem, but who was not a scientific philologist; the actual inception of the language occurred in a dream. Volapuk was almost the first real attempt at an organic language capable of being used for the oral transmission of thought. On this account, no doubt, it met with great and widespread success; it was actively taken up by a professor at Paris, societies were formed for its propagation, journals and hundreds of books were published in it; its adherents were estimated at a million. But its success, though brilliant, was short-lived. In 1889, when the third Volapuk Congress was held, it was at the height of its success, but thereafter dissension arose, and its reputation suddenly collapsed. No one now speaks Volapuk; it is regarded as a hideous monstrosity, even by those who have the most lively faith in artificial languages. Its inventor has outlived his language, and, like it, has been forgotten by the world, though his achievement was a real step towards the solution of the problem.

The collapse of Volapuk discouraged thoughtful persons from expecting any solution of the problem in an artificial language. It seemed extremely improbable that any invented language, least of all the unaided product of a single mind, could ever be generally accepted, or be worthy of general acceptance, as an international mode of communication. Such a language failed to carry the prestige necessary to overcome the immense inertia which any attempt to adopt it would meet with. Invented languages, the visionary schemes of idealists, apparently received no support from practical men of affairs. It seemed to be among actual languages, living or dead, that we might most reasonably expect to find a medium of communication likely to receive wide support. The difficulty then lay in deciding which language should be selected.

Russian had sometimes been advocated as the universal language for international purposes, and it is possible to point to the enormous territory of Russia, its growing power and the fact that Russian is the real or official language of a larger number of people than any other language except English. But Russian is so unlike the Latin and Teutonic tongues, used by the majority of European peoples; it is so complicated, so difficult to acquire, and, moreover, so lacking in concision that it has never had many enthusiastic advocates.

The virtues and defects of Spanish, which has found many enthusiastic supporters, are of an opposite character. It is an admirably vigorous and euphonious language, on a sound phonetic basis, every letter always standing for a definite sound; the grammar is simple and exceptionally free from irregularities, and it is the key to a great literature.

Billroth, the distinguished Austrian surgeon, advocated the adoption of Spanish; he regarded English as really more suitable, but, he pointed out, it is so difficult for the Latin races to speak non-Latin tongues that a Romance language is essential, and Spanish is the simplest and most logical of the Romance tongues.[237] It is, moreover, spoken by a vast number of people in South America and elsewhere.

A few enthusiasts have advocated Greek, and have supported their claim with the argument that it is still a living language. But although Greek is the key to a small but precious literature, and is one of the sources of latter-day speech and scientific terminology, it is difficult, it is without special adaptation to modern uses, and there are no adequate reasons why it should be made an international language.

Latin cannot be dismissed quite so hastily. It has in its favour the powerful argument that it has once already been found adequate to serve as the universal language. There is a widespread opinion to-day among the medical profession--the profession most actively interested in the establishment of a universal language--that Latin should be adopted, and before the International Medical Congress at Rome in 1894, a pet.i.tion to this effect was presented by some eight hundred doctors in India.[238] It is undoubtedly an admirable language, expressive, concentrated, precise.

But the objections are serious. The relative importance of Latin to-day is very far from what it was a thousand years ago, for conditions have wholly changed. There is now no great influence, such as the Catholic Church was of old, to enforce Latin, even if it possessed greater advantages. And the advantages are very mixed. Latin is a wholly dead tongue, and except in a degenerate form not by any means an easy one to learn, for its genius is wholly opposed to the genius even of those modern languages which are most closely allied to it. The world never returns on its own path. Although the prestige of Latin is still enormous, a language could only be brought from death to life by some widespread motor force; such a force no longer exists behind Latin.

There remain English and French, and these are undoubtedly the two natural languages most often put forward--even outside England and France--as possessing the best claims for adoption as auxiliary international mediums of communication.

English, especially, was claimed by many, some twenty years ago, to be not merely the auxiliary language of the future, but the universal language which must spread all over the world and supersede and drive out all others by a kind of survival of the fittest. This notion of a universal language is now everywhere regarded as a delusion, but at that time there was still thought by many to be a kind of special procreative activity in the communities of Anglo-Saxon origin which would naturally tend to replace all other peoples, both the people and the language being regarded as the fittest to survive.[239] English was, however, rightly felt to be a language with very great force behind it, being spoken by vast communities possessing a peculiarly energetic and progressive temperament, and with much power of peaceful penetration in other lands. It is generally acknowledged also that English fully deserves to be ranked as one of the first of languages by its fine apt.i.tude for powerful expression, while at the same time it is equally fitted for routine commercial purposes. The wide extension of English and its fine qualities have often been emphasized, and it is unnecessary to dwell on them here. The decision of the scientific societies of the world to use English for bibliographical purposes is not entirely a tribute to English energy in organization, but to the quality of the language. One finds, indeed, that these facts are widely recognized abroad, in France and elsewhere, though I have noted that those who foretell the conquest of English, even when they are men of intellectual distinction and able to read English, are often quite unable to speak it or to understand it when spoken.

That brings us to a point which is overlooked by those who triumphantly pointed to the natural settlement of this question by the swamping of other tongues in the overflowing tide of English speech. English is the most concise and laconic of the great languages. Greek, French and German are all more expansive, more syllabically copious. Latin alone may be said to equal, or surpa.s.s English in concentration, because, although Latin words are longer on the average, by their greater inflection they cover a larger number of English words. This power of English to attain expression with a minimum expenditure of energy in written speech is one of its chief claims to succeed Latin as the auxiliary international language. But it furnishes no claim to preference for actual speaking, in which this economy of energy ceases to be a supreme virtue, since here we have also to admit the virtues of easy intelligibility and of persuasiveness. Greek largely owed its admirable fitness for speech to the natural richness and prolongation of its euphonious words, which allowed the speaker to attain the legitimate utterance of his thought without pauses or superfluous repet.i.tion.

French, again, while by no means inapt for concentration, as the _pensee_ writers show, most easily lends itself to effects that are meant for speech, as in Bossuet, or that recall speech, as in Mme de Sevigne in one order of literature, or Renan in another. But at Rome, we feel, the spoken tongue had a difficulty to overcome, and the mellifluously prolonged rhetoric of Cicero, delightful as it may be, scarcely seems to reveal to us the genius of the Latin tongue. The inapt.i.tude of English for the purposes of speech is even more conspicuous, and is again well ill.u.s.trated in our oratory. Gladstone was an orator of acknowledged eloquence, but the extreme looseness and redundancy into which his language was apt to fall in the effort to attain the verbose richness required for the ends of spoken speech, reveals too clearly the poverty of English from this point of view. The same tendency is also ill.u.s.trated by the vain re-iterations of ordinary speakers. The English intellect, with all its fine qualities, is not sufficiently nimble for either speaker or hearer to keep up with the swift brevity of the English tongue. It is a curious fact that Great Britain takes the lead in Europe in the prevalence of stuttering; the language is probably a factor in this evil pre-eminence, for it appears that the Chinese, whose language is powerfully rhythmic, never stutter.

One authority has declared that ”no nation in the civilized world speaks its language so abominably as the English.” We can scarcely admit that this English difficulty of speech is the result of some organic defect in English nervous systems; the language itself must be a factor in the matter. I have found, when discussing the point with scientific men and others abroad, that the opinion prevails that it is usually difficult to follow a speaker in English. This experience may, indeed, be considered general. While an admirably strong and concise language, English is by no means so adequate in actual speech; it is not one of the languages which can be heard at a long distance, and, moreover, it lends itself in speaking to so many contractions that are not used in writing--so many ”can'ts” and ”won'ts” and ”don'ts,” which suit English taciturnity, but slur and ruin English speech--that English, as spoken, is almost a different language from that which excites admiration when written. So that the exclusive use of English for international purposes would not be the survival of the fittest so far as a language for speaking purposes is concerned.

Moreover, it must be remembered that English is not a democratic language. It is not, like the chief Romance languages and the chief Teutonic languages, practically h.o.m.ogeneous, made out of one block. It is formed by the mixture of two utterly unlike elements, one aristocratic, the other plebeian. Ever since the Norman lord came over to England a profound social inequality has become rooted in the very language. In French, _boeuf_ and _mouton_ and _veau_ and _porc_ have always been the same for master and for man, in the field and on the table; the animal has never changed its plebeian name for an aristocratic name as it pa.s.sed through the cook's hands. That example is typical of the curious mark which the Norman Conquest left on our speech, rendering it so much more difficult for us than for the French to attain equality of social intercourse. Inequality is stamped indelibly into our language as into no other great language. Of course, from the literary point of view, that is all gain, and has been of incomparable aid to our poets in helping them to reach their most magnificent effects, as we may see conspicuously in Shakespeare's enormous vocabulary. But from the point of view of equal social intercourse, this wealth of language is worse than lost, it is disastrous. The old feudal distinctions are still perpetuated; the ”man”