the navy, and all the developmental activities of government. So it is no longer a matter of favour or of caprice what course of action shall be followed and what men shall be selected to do the work, but in these things scientific demonstration and impartial tests control. This is also true of such fields as taxation, railway control, and the inspection of all other economic activities. The prominence of the expert side of government, therefore, gives to that scientific unity, which permeates others fields of life, the same importance in public affairs. Thus the States become members of international unions in which expert administrations exchange their experience and formulate rules and principles for their common guidance.

The principle of expert administration in modern government is balanced by that of public discussion in parliaments. The danger of bureaucratic narrowness, which may be present even in men guided by scientific judgment, is met by calling upon the public in general to participate in State affairs, to make known its opinion, and to select representatives who will constitute a "great inquest" of the nation. Thus there is supplied a corrective of administrative decisions and a motive power which gives original strength and energy to the acts of government. The same unifying tendencies which we have observed in other branches of human life are found here. The significance of the modern universal tendencies towards parliamentarism will be discussed by other speakers. From them we shall hear what effects are to be expected from the recent institutional changes in Turkey, Persia, Japan, China, and Russia, and from the Liberal movement in Mexico. When those new vast forces of public interest and energy are brought into the political field of action, we may indeed expect that the policies of the world will be profoundly influenced. It would be an interesting inquiry to try to trace out in detail how far the unifying power of scientific civilisation could be expected to operate upon parliamentary institutions and popular electorates the world over. With a mutual assimilation of the forms of government, there still remain very deep-seated differences in popular sentiment, which a growing scientific culture must seek gradually to overcome. Prejudices among broad masses of humanity are usually used as material for reactionary policies. The expectations that democratic Parliaments would always be pacific and humane have been disappointed; but the great gain from the recent changes which we have noted will be that the progress of humanity in the future will not depend on narrower groups or coteries, but upon the manner in which humanity itself, that is, the masses of mankind, are able to respond to higher demands and ideals.

The basis of political action is thus constantly being broadened out. The men who compose Governments must take into account natural conditions and scientific methods, and participation in public action is extended to constantly larger numbers. In the latter, primal passions and prejudices are still active; but with the spread of intelligence and scientific methods of thought they too will come to appreciate more and more the underlying unity of mankind. Intelligence, allied on the one hand to the ideals of a common humanity, on the other to a grasp of the complex, but unifying, forces that make up the modern industrial world-this intelligence we may rely upon to make political action more and more rational. In the last analysis, the highest demands of humanity and of efficiency are one; the world advances because the ideal attracts, and because science compels.

[Paper submitted in English.]

LANGUAGE AS A CONSOLIDATING AND SEPARATING INFLUENCE

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By D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, D.Litt.,

Professor of Arabic in the University of Oxford.

THE relations between language and nationality vary very much at different stages of evolution. If we imagine a nation to commence, as its name implies, merely as an interbreeding group of human beings, it is evident that each group of the kind will have a common language or system of phonetic symbols for the communication of ideas, and that whoever transfers himself from one group to another will be compelled to adopt the system of the latter, unless he can force them to adopt his. But when the nation becomes a political unit, may very well embrace numerous groups of the kind. It will be sufficient if there are a few persons capable of acting as interpreters. Hence both in ancient and in modern times there have been nations in the wider sense without a national language; such, eg., is the case of Switzerland in the present day; and the Babylonian king who issued rescripts to "all peoples, nations, and languages" was addressing the inhabitants of one empire, and in the larger sense the members of one nation. But even where there is a national language, as in the British Isles, there may be groups of the population who rarely use it; even in London it is worth many a candidate's while to issue his address in a foreign language in order to appeal to a section of the constituents. Sometimes these groups are fluctuating, and the next generation will have adopted the national language; in

other cases a peculiar dialect or even language is tenaciously maintained by local groups, who, however, may be as patriotic as the rest. On the other hand, two or more nations may have the same national language, and yet be no appreciably nearer to each other than if they spoke different tongues; understanding in one sense does not prevent misunderstanding in another.

Of the various ties which bind human beings together that of common language seems to possess no great strength. Other bonds protect it rather than it them. Where in the same city different languages are spoken in different quarters, the quarters are not isolated because the inhabitants speak different languages, but they speak different languages because they are isolated. They are isolated owing to religion or nationality; and each preserves its own dialect in consequence. This is the case, g., in some Persian cities; yet even there most of the inhabitants become bilingual or trilingual; were it not for the real bonds which keep the groups together the linguistic differences would quickly disappear.

Even where religion and nationality are able to maintain the interbreeding group in its purity, they often fail to maintain the national language. How variable their efficiency is in this matter can be illustrated from the phenomena of the Islamic empire; the East Syrians have maintained their vernacular, the West Syrians have lost theirs; Armenian is still spoken in Armenia, but Coptic is no longer spoken in Egypt. The Jews, like the Copts, might be taken as a type of a tenaciously interbreeding group; yet the Jews have no national language; they speak a patois of German or Spanish, or else make the language of their neighbours their own. Both these races have indeed retained religious languages as the possession of the learned among them; but for ordinary use “a live dog is better than a dead lion."

Statesmen in both ancient and modern times have assumed that the spirit of national independence must be fostered by the maintenance of a national language; and just as under the Roman Republic the revolt of the Allies was accompanied by an attempt to resuscitate Oscan, so in our day the ardent Irish Nationalist would like to see Irish take the place of English in the Emerald Isle. A policy of this sort seems to be based on a confusion of ideas. Like the Sabbath, like weights and measures, like the coinage, language exists for man, not man for language. A private language has about the same value as a cipher; it enables a group of men to communicate without being understood by others; but the cipher gives them no advantage unless they can understand the others. The interests of the statesman are wholly different from those of the antiquarian or the naturalist; uniformity is the ideal of the one, variety what

charms the others. That a great nation can arise without a peculiar language is demonstrated by the example of the United States; that nationality may be maintained in defiance of time and space, though the national language is forgotten, is proved by the history of the Jews. The endeavour therefore to turn an obscure vernacular into a national language when the nation is already in possession of one of the great languages of civilisation is not unlike in wisdom to the practice of burning bank-notes in order to show contempt for the bank that issued them.

The converse practice, forcible suppression of a language for fear of its preserving a nationality which the statesman wishes to merge in another is somewhat more benevolent, but unlikely to compass its end. Polish children who are made to learn German or Russian instead of their mother tongue will certainly be better equipped for the battle of life than if they had been taught Polish; for the utility of a language varies with the number of persons whom it enables one to understand. But that a Polish child will be prevented from becoming a Polish patriot because it has been compelled to learn some language other than Polish is an assumption not justified by experience. As has been seen, those interbreeding groups that have preserved nationality most tenaciously have lost their national languages.

It might be thought that the possession of a national literature, as a ground for national pride, would add to the isolating power of a national language. There are reasons which either modify this effect or even annul it. On the one hand, any national literature that is of value is international; seven cities claim to be Homer's birthplace; Paris has a public monument to Shakespeare; the Bible-originally a collection of Hebrew and Greek books-is pronounced by a queen to be the source of England's greatness. Treasures are of little value if they are not coveted. Carlyle would not have regarded Shakespeare as a better national asset than the Cossacks if only England knew of Shakespeare. And as a rule the hereditary owners of such treasures are proud and delighted that others should share or even enter into their inheritance.

Literary masterpieces can take care of themselves, for there will always be men eager to master their original languages in order to interpret them correctly; and since the variations in language which are due to time are as great as those due to any other cause, the hereditary interpreter will not necessarily be the best interpreter ; those who have done most for the interpretation of the Greek classics have as a rule had little acquaintance with the dialects of modern Greek.

Languages, then, are not worth artificially preserving either for

patriotic or literary purposes; like railways, they are instruments for communication; and the question whether it is desirable to have many languages or one is not very different from the question whether it is best for each country to have its own gauge or that all should have a common gauge. The protection from invasion afforded by a separate gauge is slight; the facilities for commerce provided by a uniform gauge are vast. The advantage to Europe and to mankind of a common language would be infinitely greater than any loss which could be sustained through the abandonment of a national language. The sound principle for determining what gauge should be adopted, if the gauges of the countries were different and it were decided that they should be unified, would be this: capital and energy are assets of the whole world, whence the mode of unification should be that which expended least capital and least energy. The gauges should be altered to the gauge of the country which had the greatest mileage and the largest amount of rolling stock.

The same is the sound principle on which the unification of language may one day be attempted; perhaps our Congress will have played a modest part in preparing the way. The invention of a new language would be the least economical method; for any language in possession of literary monuments, and which has been used for journalism, has accumulations of "rolling stock" in the shape of phraseology and idioms for which a substitute would have to be provided. Those accumulations represent in any case the expenditure of much energy; in the case of the great languages of civilisation vast expenditure, much of the product would necessarily have to be thrown away in the event of unification, but it would be wasteful to abandon what could be preserved.

Like most human institutions, language has been the subject of numerous prejudices and superstitions; but few of these are now deserving of either notice or refutation. The excellence of language is that it should be clear and not mean; in these words Aristotle (as usual) summed up all that can be said on the subject. Suppose that Arabic and English were spoken by the same number of individuals, the scale would be turned in favour of English by the considerations that it inserts its vowels, employs capitals, and can use italics; a page of English is therefore vastly clearer than a page of Arabic. Between the great languages of Western civilisation-English, French, and German-it would not be possible to decide by these tests; none of them leaves anything to be desired in either clearness or sublimity. The only principle capable of application would be that which has been suggested-let that language be universally adopted the adoption of which could be effected with the greatest economy.