Note 6 — Chapter VIII · EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

After mathematics, no doubt languages occupy chief place in the righteous abhorrence of present-day school-children. I say righteous abhorrence with intention, because this department of useful learning always has the air of being purposely planned in order to secure the maximum of execration accompanied by the minimum of advantage. What languages will be taught a hundred years hence, and in what manner will they be instilled into the children of our great-great-grand-children? Any opinions upon a controversy so recent as that which a few months ago raged about the question of compulsory Greek must be more or less untrustworthy. Every man will take the view of the future of the dead languages (so called, as someone6 sanguinely remarked, because they can never die) determined by his own view as to whether proficiency in the tongues of Hellas and of Rome ought to be maintained in his own day. But for a reason probably admitting of very little controversy, it is at all events permissible to believe that the classical languages will at least not have to meet the urgent competition of a variety of current languages as subjects of useful learning. This reason is to be found in the evident tendency of a paramount tongue to extrude other tongues from practical employment in commerce; and commerce, more than anything else, will of course always determine the question of modern language study. Provided that the race which becomes paramount in the markets of the world during the course of this century possesses a reasonably philosophical, copious, precise language, and one fairly easy to acquire, it is likely that for commercial purposes it will become (to use an incorrect, but not conveniently replaceable term) universal. To the facile remark that every nation considers its own speech easy enough for foreigners to acquire, and much more satisfactory in the other respects named than any tongue which it is invited to give itself the trouble of learning, may be opposed the reply that peoples do in fact recognise, where it exists, the unsatisfactory nature of their own speech. For example, nearly every Russian whom one meets in polite or commercial circles speaks at least French, and often speaks it admirably; while in Norway, though the Scandinavian languages are none of them anything like so difficult to learn as Russian, practically everyone speaks English. The case of Japan is even more illustrative; for apart from the fact that enough of some European language to enable one to travel with perfect comfort is always to be found current in the Mikado’s empire, it is the case that even for domestic use the Japanese have a popular language, printed in newspapers and in some books alongside of the more literary Chinese idæographs, and frequently used to elucidate the latter.7