Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/286

282 as interpreters are needed, as long as the ability to interpret rests only with the officials of the government, the faculties of the universities, and the small proportion of citizens and students who have opportunity of extended residence in at least one country besides the native one, just so long is perfect understanding impossible. For perfect understanding between two nations results from an understanding between a majority of the citizens of these two nations, not from even the most perfect understanding and appreciation of one by but a small minority in the other. This is true even if the minority happens to be the political body in control. For in one way or another the people rule, and public opinion and desire, however faulty, exert a mighty influence.

Accordingly, if international sympathy and agreement rest upon adequate mutual understanding attained through the complete comprehension of more languages than the mother-tongue among the general public—whether these languages be spoken, printed in newspapers, pamphlets and books, or written in letters amicably exchanged—the immediate solution suggesting itself is this: Let all or a majority of the citizens of each nation learn thoroughly the language of each other nation. Then will the barrier to intercommunication disappear. Each individual may read at will and at once the publications of every other; may express his ideas and have his questions answered, orally or by correspondence, with citizens of any nation; and may feel himself linguistically at home in any country of the world, without the present need of guidebooks, couriers and interpreters, ever provocative of mutual distrust.

Such a proposition is, however, utterly futile from a practical point of view. Persons in comfortable financial circumstances may learn several languages besides their own, business men stationed in foreign countries may do so to some extent, and peasant immigrants may do the same in limited degree; but the possessor of more than a moderate familiarity with two or three languages is called a linguist, and placed in a class apart, as differing by that very fact from the majority of mankind. Genuine admiration is accorded any person who has completely mastered three or four languages in addition to his mother-tongue, and speaks and writes all of them with equal fluency, exactness and elegance. Nor is any one surprised to hear that such an expert spends many years and much care in acquiring these three or four languages with a reasonable perfection of pronunciation, syntax and style, or that teaching this is in itself a profession worthy of remuneration.

Yet to be truly a polyglot one must be familiar with not only French and German, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, each difficult of mastery, and the Scandinavian languages, but also Dutch, Flemish, Portuguese, Roumanian, Catalonian, Greek and the many languages allied to Russian, such as Bohemian, Polish, Servian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, etc., and also the non-Aryan tongues of Europe, such as Hungarian and