International Language | Page 6

in a
national language.
Even more convincing perhaps, for the uninitiated, is the evidence
afforded by the International Congresses of Esperantists. The first was
held at Boulogne in August 1905. It marked an epoch in the lives of
many of the participants, whose doubts as to the practical nature of an
artificial language there, for good and all, yielded to the logic of facts;
and it may well be that it will some day be rather an outstanding
landmark in the history of civilization. A brief description will,
therefore, not be out of place.
In the little seaport town on the north coast of France had come
together men and women of more than twenty different races. Some
were experts, some were beginners; but all save a very few must have
been alike in this, that they had learnt their Esperanto at home, and, as
far as oral use went, had only been able to speak it (if at all) with
members of their own national groups--that is, with compatriots who
had acquired the language under the same conditions as to
pronunciation, etc., as themselves. Experts and beginners, those who
from practical experience knew the great possibilities of the new
tongue as a written medium, no less than the neophytes and tentative
experimenters who had come to see whether the thing was worth taking
seriously, they were now to make the decisive trial--in the one case to
test the faith that was in them, in the other to set all doubt at rest in one
sense or the other for good and all.
The town theatre had been generously placed at the disposal of the
Congress, and the author of the language, Dr. Zamenhof, had left his
eye-patients at Warsaw and come to preside at the coming out of his
kara lingvo, now well on in her 'teens, and about to leave the academic
seclusion of scholastic use and emerge into the larger sphere of social
and practical activity.
On Saturday evening, August 5, at eight o'clock, the Boulogne Theatre
was packed with a cosmopolitan audience. The unique assembly was

pervaded by an indefinable feeling of expectancy; as in the lull before
the thunderstorm, there was the hush of excitement, the tense silence
charged with the premonition of some vast force about to be let loose
on the world. After a few preliminaries, there was a really dramatic
moment when Dr. Zamenhof stood up for the first time to address his
world-audience in the world-tongue. Would they understand him? Was
their hope about to be justified? or was it all a chimera, "such stuff as
dreams are made on"?
Gesinjoroj (= Ladies and gentlemen)--the great audience craned
forward like one man, straining eyes and ears towards the
speaker,--Kun granda plezuro mi akceptis la proponon... The crowd
drank in the words with an almost pathetic agony of anxiety. Gradually,
as the clear-cut sentences poured forth in a continuous stream of perfect
lucidity, and the audience realized that they were all listening to and all
understanding a really international speech in a really international
tongue--a tongue which secured to them, as here in Boulogne so
throughout the world, full comprehension and a sense of comradeship
and fellow-citizenship on equal terms with all users of it--the anxiety
gave way to a scene of wild enthusiasm. Men shook hands with perfect
strangers, and all cheered and cheered again. Zamenhof finished with a
solemn declamation of one of his hymns (given as an appendix to this
volume, with translation), embodying the lofty ideal which has inspired
him all through and sustained him through the many difficulties he has
had to face. When he came to the end, the fine passage beginning with
the words, Ni inter popoloj la murojn detruos ("we shall throw down
the walls between the peoples"), and ending amo kaj vero ekregos sur
tero ("love and truth shall begin their reign on earth"), the whole
concourse rose to their feet with prolonged cries of "Vivu Zamenhof!"
No doubt this enthusiasm may sound rather forced and unreal to those
who have not attended a congress, and the cheers may ring hollow
across intervening time and space. Neither would it be good for this or
any movement to rely upon facile enthusiasm, as easily damped as
aroused. There is something far more than this in the international
language movement.

At the same time, it is impossible for any one who has not tried it to
realize the thrill--not a weak, sentimental thrill, but a reasonable thrill,
starting from objective fact and running down the marrow of
things--given by the first real contact with an international language in
an international setting. There really is a feeling as of a new power born
into the world.
Those who were present at the Geneva Congress, 1906, will not soon