International Language | Page 5

that it does not pay to do a thing a
hard way, if the same results can be produced by an easy way.
The whole industrial revolution brought about by the invention of
machinery depended upon this principle. Since an artificial language,
like machinery, is a means invented by man of furthering his ends,
there seems to be no abuse of analogy in comparing them.
When it was found that machinery would turn out a hundred pieces of
cloth while the hand-loom turned out one, the hand-loom was doomed,

except in so far as it may serve other ends, antiquarian, aesthetic, or
artistic, which are not equally well served by machinery. Similarly, to
take another revolution which is going on in our own day through a
further application of machinery, when it is found that corn can be
reaped and threshed by machinery, that hay can be cut, made, carried,
and stacked by machinery, that man can travel the high road by
machinery, sooner or later machinery is bound to get the bulk of the job,
because it produces the same results at greater speed and less cost. So,
in the field of international intercourse, if an easy artificial language
can with equal efficiency and at less cost produce the same results as a
multiplicity of natural ones, in many lines of human activity, and
making all reserves in matters antiquarian, aesthetic, and artistic,
sooner or later the multiplicity will have to go to the scrap-heap[1] as
cumbrous and out of date. It may be a hundred years; it may be fifty; it
may be even twenty. Almost certainly the irresistible trend of economic
pressure will work its will and insist that what has to be done shall be
done in the most economical way.
[1]But only, of course, in those lines in which an international auxiliary
language can produce equally good results. This excludes home use,
national literature, philology, scholarly study of national languages, etc.
So much, then, for the question of principle. In treating it, certain large
assumptions have been made; e.g. it is said above, "if an easy artificial
language can with equal efficiency... produce the same results," etc.
Here it is assumed that the artificial language is (1) easy, and (2) that it
is possible for it to produce the same results. Again, however easy and
possible, its introduction might cost more than it saved. These are
questions of fact, and are treated in the three following chapters under
the heading of "The Question of Practice."
III
THE QUESTION OF PRACTICE--AN INTERNATIONAL
LANGUAGE IS POSSIBLE
The man who says a thing is impossible without troubling to find out
whether it has been done is merely "talking through his hat," to use an

Americanism, and we need not waste much time on him. Any one, who
maintains that it is impossible to transact the ordinary business of life
and write lucid treatises on scientific and other subjects in an artificial
language, is simply in the position of the French engineer, who gave a
full scientific demonstration of the fact that an engine could not
possibly travel by steam.
The plain fact is that not only one artificial language, but several,
already exist, which not only can express, but already have expressed
all the ideas current in social intercourse, business, and serious
exposition. It is only necessary to state the facts briefly.
First--Volapük.
Three congresses were held in all for the promotion of this language.
The third (Paris, 1889) was the most important. It was attended by
Volapükists from many different nations, who carried on all their
business in Volapük, and found no difficulty in understanding one
another. Besides this, there were a great many newspapers published in
Volapük, which treated of all kinds of subjects.
Secondly--Idiom Neutral, the lineal descendant of Volapük.
It is regulated by an international academy, which sends round circulars
and does all its business in Idiom Neutral.
Thirdly--Esperanto.
Since the publication of the language in 1887 it has had a gradually
increasing number of adherents, who have used it for all ordinary
purposes of communication. A great number of newspapers and
reviews of all kinds are now published regularly in Esperanto in a great
variety of countries. I take up a chance number of the Internacia
Scienca Revuo, which happens to be on my table, and find the
following subjects among the contents of the month: "Rôle of living
beings in the general physiology of the earth," "The carnivorous
animals of Sweden," "The part played by heredity in the etiology of
chronic nephritis," "The migration of the lemings," "Notices of books,"

"Notes and correspondence," etc. In fact, the Review has all the
appearance of an ordinary scientific periodical, and the articles are as
clearly expressed and as easy to read as those in any similar review