Page:Esperanto (The Universal Language).djvu/12

 the study of several different languages, we cannot study any of them sufficiently well, and there are but few persons who can even boast a complete mastery of their mother-tongue. On the other hand, languages cannot progress towards perfection, and we are often obliged, even in speaking our own language, to borrow words and expressions from foreigners, or to express our thoughts inexactly.

How different would the case be had we but two languages to learn; we should know them infinitely better, and the languages themselves would grow richer, and reach a higher degree of perfection than is found in any of those now existing. And yet though language is the prime motor of civilisation, and to it alone we owe the fact that we have raised ourselves above the level of other animals, difference of speech is a cause of antipathy, nay even of hatred, between people, as being the first thing to strike us on meeting. Not being understood we keep aloof, and the first notion that occurs to our minds is, not to find out whether the others are of our own political opinions, or whence their ancestors came from thousands of years ago, but to dislike the strange sound of their language. Moreover, anyone who has lived for a length of time in a commercial city, whose inhabitants were of different unfriendly nations, will easily understand what a boon would be conferred on mankind by the adoption of an international idiom, which, without interfering with domestic affairs or the private life of nations, would play the part of an official and commercial dialect, at any rate, in countries inhabited by people of different nationalities.

I will not expatiate on the immense importance which, it may well be imagined, an international language would acquire in science, commerce, etc. Whoever has but once bestowed a thought on the subject will surely acknowledge that no sacrifice