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Anticipations Chapter 7 Part 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter seven A of Anticipations. This is a LibriVox recording.
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Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Anticipations
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Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells, Chapter seven A, The Conflict of Languages.
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Speaker 1: We have brought together thus far in these anticipations the
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Speaker 1: material for the picture of a human community somewhere towards
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Speaker 1: the year two thousand. We have imagined its roads, the
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Speaker 1: type and appearance of its homes, its social developments, its
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Speaker 1: internal struggle for organization. We have speculated upon its moral
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Speaker 1: and esthetic condition, read its newspaper, made an advanced criticism
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Speaker 1: upon the lack of universality in its literature, and attempted
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Speaker 1: to imagine it at war. We have decided, in particular
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Speaker 1: that unlike the civilized community of the immediate past, which
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Speaker 1: lived either in sharp defined towns or agriculturally over a
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Speaker 1: wide country, this population will be distributed in a quite
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Speaker 1: different way, a little more thickly over vast urban regions,
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Speaker 1: and a little less thickly over less attractive or less
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Speaker 1: convenient or less industrial parts of the world. And implicit
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Speaker 1: in all that has been written, there has appeared an
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Speaker 1: unavoidable assumption that the coming community will be vast, something
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Speaker 1: geographically more extensive than most and geographically different from almost
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Speaker 1: all existing communities. That the outline its creative forces will
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Speaker 1: draw not only does not coincide with existing political centers
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Speaker 1: and boundaries, but will be more often than not indirect
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Speaker 1: conflict with them, uniting areas that are separated, and separating
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Speaker 1: areas that are united, grouping here half a dozen tongues
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Speaker 1: and peoples together, and there tearing apart homogeneous bodies, and
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Speaker 1: distributing the fragments among separate groups. And it will now
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Speaker 1: be well to inquire a little into the general causes
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Speaker 1: of these existing divisions, the political boundaries of to day,
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Speaker 1: and the still older contours of language and race. It
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Speaker 1: is first to be remarked that each of these sets
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Speaker 1: of boundaries, as superimposed as it were on the older sets.
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Speaker 1: The race areas, for example, which are now not traceable
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Speaker 1: in Europe at all, must have represented old regions of separation.
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Speaker 1: The language areas, which have little or no essential relation
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Speaker 1: to racial distribution, have also given way long since to
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Speaker 1: the newer forces that have united and consolidated nations, and
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Speaker 1: the still newer forces that have united and separated. The
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Speaker 1: nineteenth century states have been and in many cases are
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Speaker 1: still in manifest conflict with national ideas now in the
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Speaker 1: original separation of human races, in the subsequent differentiation and
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Speaker 1: spread of languages, in the separation of men inter nationalities,
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Speaker 1: and in the union and splitting of states and empires.
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Speaker 1: We have to deal essentially with the fluctuating manifestations of
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Speaker 1: the same fundamental shaping factor, which will determine the distribution
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Speaker 1: of urban districts in the coming years. Every boundary of
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Speaker 1: the ethnographical, linguistic, political, and commercial map, as a little
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Speaker 1: consideration will show, has indeed been traced in the first
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Speaker 1: place by the means of transit. Under the compulsion of
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Speaker 1: geographical contours, there are evident in Europe four or five
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Speaker 1: or more very distinct racial types. And since the methods
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Speaker 1: and rewards of barbaric warfare and the nature of the
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Speaker 1: chief chattels of barbaric trade have always been diametrically opposed
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Speaker 1: to racial purity, their original separation could only have gone
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Speaker 1: on through such an entire lack of communication, as prevented
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Speaker 1: either trade or warfare between the bulk of the differentiating bodies.
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Speaker 1: These original racial types are now inextricably mingled. Unobservant over
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Speaker 1: scholarly people talk or write in the profoundest manner about
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Speaker 1: a Teutonic race and a Celtic race, and institute all
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Speaker 1: sorts of curious contrasts between these fantoms. But these are
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Speaker 1: not races at all. Of physical characteristics have anything to
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Speaker 1: do with race. The Dane, the Bavarian, the Prussian, the Frieslander,
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Speaker 1: the Wessex peasant, the Kentish Man, the Virginian, the man
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Speaker 1: from New Jersey, the Norwegian, the Swede, and the Transvalbois
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Speaker 1: are generalized about, for example, as Teutonic, while the short, dark,
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Speaker 1: cunning sort of Welshman, the tall and generous Highlander, the
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Speaker 1: miscellaneous Irish, the square headed Breton, and any sort of
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Speaker 1: Cornwall peasant are celts within the meaning of this oil
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Speaker 1: lamp anthropology footnote. Under the intoxication of the Celtic Renaissance,
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Speaker 1: the most diverse sorts of human beings have foregathered and
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Speaker 1: met face to face and been photographed penn celtically, and
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Speaker 1: have no doubt gloated over these color photographs without any
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Speaker 1: of them realizing it seems what a miscellaneous thing the
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Speaker 1: Celtic race must be. There is nothing that may or
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Speaker 1: may not be a celt And I know, for example,
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Speaker 1: professional Celts who are so far as race manners, accents, morals,
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Speaker 1: and ideals go indistinguishable from other people who are, I
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Speaker 1: am told, indisputably asseroid Jews. End footnote. People who believe
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Speaker 1: in this sort of thing are not the sort of
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Speaker 1: people that one attempts to convert by a said argument.
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Speaker 1: One need only say the thing is not so. There
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Speaker 1: is no Teutonic race, and there never has been. There
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Speaker 1: is no Celtic race, and there never has been. No
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Speaker 1: one has ever proved or attempted to prove the existence
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Speaker 1: of such races. The thing has always been assumed. They
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Speaker 1: are dogmas with nothing but questionable authority behind them, and
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Speaker 1: the onus of proof rests on the believer. This nonsense
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Speaker 1: about Celtic and Teutonic is no more science than Lombroso's
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Speaker 1: extraordinary assertions about criminals or palm mystry, or the development
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Speaker 1: of religion from a solar myth. Indisputably, there are several
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Speaker 1: races intermingled in the European populations. I am inclined to
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Speaker 1: suspect the primitive European races may be found to be
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Speaker 1: so distinct as to resist confusion and pamnixia through hybridization.
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Speaker 1: But there is no inkling of a satisfactory analysis yet
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Speaker 1: that will discriminate what these races were and define them
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Speaker 1: in terms of physical and moral character. The fact remains
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Speaker 1: there is no such thing as a racially pure and
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Speaker 1: homogeneous community in Europe, distinct from other communities. Even among
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Speaker 1: the Jews. According to Urkert and Chantrey and J. Jacobs,
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Speaker 1: there are markedly divergent types. There may have been to
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Speaker 1: original elements, and there have been extensive local intermixtures long
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Speaker 1: before the beginnings of history. While even language was in
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Speaker 1: its first begin indeed, as another aspect of the same
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Speaker 1: process as the beginning of language, the first complete isolations
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Speaker 1: that established race were breaking down again. The little pools
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Speaker 1: of race were running together into less homogeneous lagoons and
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Speaker 1: marshes of humanity. The first paths were being worn war paths.
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Speaker 1: For the most part. Still, differentiation would be largely at work.
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Speaker 1: Without frequent intercourse, frequent interchange of women as the great
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Speaker 1: factor in that intercourse, the tribes and bands of mankind
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Speaker 1: would still go on separating, would develop dialectic and customary,
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Speaker 1: if not physical and moral differences. It was no longer
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Speaker 1: a case of pools, perhaps, but they were still in lakes.
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Speaker 1: There were as yet no open seas of mankind. With
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Speaker 1: advancing civilization, with iron weapons and war discipline, with established
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Speaker 1: paths and a social rule, and presently, with the coming
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Speaker 1: of the horse, what one might call the areas of
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Speaker 1: assimilation would increase in size. A stage would be reached
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Speaker 1: when the only checks to transit of a sufficiently convenient
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Speaker 1: sort to keep language uniform would be the sea or mountains,
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Speaker 1: or a broad river or pure distance. And presently the
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Speaker 1: rules of the game, so to speak, would be further altered,
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Speaker 1: and the unifications and isolations that were establishing themselves upset
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Speaker 1: altogether and brought into novel conflict by the beginnings of navigation,
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Speaker 1: whereby an impassable barrier became a highway. The commencement of
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Speaker 1: actual European history coincides with the closing phases of what
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Speaker 1: was probably a very long period of a foot and
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Speaker 1: occasional horseback state of communications. The adjustments so arrived at
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Speaker 1: being already in an early state of rearrangement through the
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Speaker 1: advent of the ship. The communities of Europe were still
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Speaker 1: for the larger parts small isolated tribes and kingdoms. Such
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Speaker 1: kingdoms as a mainly pedestrian militia, or at any rate
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Speaker 1: a militia without God transport and drawn from and soon
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Speaker 1: drawn home again by agricultural work, might hold together. The
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Speaker 1: increase of transit facilities between such communities, by the development
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Speaker 1: of shipping and the invention of the wheel and the
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Speaker 1: made road, spelt increased trade, perhaps for a time, but
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Speaker 1: very speedily a more extensive form of war, and in
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Speaker 1: the end either the wearing a way of differences and
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Speaker 1: union or conquest. Man is the creature of a struggle
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Speaker 1: for existence, incurably egoistic and aggressive. Convince him of the
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Speaker 1: gospel of self abnegation, even and he instantly becomes its
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Speaker 1: zealous missionary, taking great credit that his expedients to ram
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Speaker 1: it into the minds of his fellow creatures do not
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Speaker 1: include physical force. And if that is not self abligation,
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Speaker 1: he asks, what is so? He has been, and so
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Speaker 1: he is likely to remain. Not to be so is
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Speaker 1: to die of abnegation and extinguish the type improvement in
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Speaker 1: transit between communities. Formerly for all practical purposes, isolated means
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Speaker 1: therefore and always has meant, and I imagine always will
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Speaker 1: mean that now they can get at one another, and
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Speaker 1: they do. They interbreed and fight physically, mentally, and spiritually.
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Speaker 1: Unless Providence is belied in his works, that is what
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Speaker 1: they are meant to do. A third invention, which, though
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Speaker 1: not a means of transit like the wheeled vehicle and
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Speaker 1: the ship, was yet a means of communication, rendered still
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Speaker 1: larger political reactions possible. And that was the development of
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Speaker 1: systems of writing. The first empires and some sort of
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Speaker 1: written speech arose together. Just as a kingdom, as distinguished
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Speaker 1: from a mere tribal group of villages is almost impossible
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Speaker 1: without horses, so is an empire without writing and post roads.
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Speaker 1: The history of the whole world for three thousand years
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Speaker 1: is the history of a unity larger than the small
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Speaker 1: kingdom of the Hepta Key type, endeavoring to establish itself
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Speaker 1: under the stress of these discoveries of horse traffic and
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Speaker 1: shipping and the written word. The history, that is, of
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Speaker 1: the consequences of the partial shattering of the barriers that
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Speaker 1: had been effectual enough to prevent the fusion of more
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Speaker 1: than tribal communities through all the long ages before the
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Speaker 1: dawn of history. East of the Gobi Pamir Barrier there
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Speaker 1: has slowly grown up under these new conditions the Chinese system.
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Speaker 1: West and north of the Sahara Gobi Barrier of deserts
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Speaker 1: and mountains, the extraordinarily strong and spacious conceptions of the
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Speaker 1: Romans succeeded in dominating the world, and do indeed in
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Speaker 1: a sort of mutilated way. By the powers of great
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Speaker 1: words and wide ideas in Caesarism and imperialism, in the
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Speaker 1: titles of Czar, Kaiser and imperator, in papal pretension, and
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Speaker 1: countless political devices dominate it to this hour. For a while,
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Speaker 1: these conceptions sustained a united and to a large extent
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Speaker 1: organized empire over very much of this space. But at
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Speaker 1: its stablest time, this union was no more than a
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Speaker 1: political union, the spreading of a thin layer of Latin
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Speaker 1: speaking officials, of a thin network of roads, and a
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Speaker 1: very thin veneer indeed of customs and refinements over the
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Speaker 1: scarcely touched national masses. It checked, perhaps, but at nowhere
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Speaker 1: succeeded in stopping the slow but inevitable differentiation of province
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Speaker 1: from province and nation from nation. The forces of transit
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Speaker 1: that permitted the Roman imperialism and its partial successes to
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Speaker 1: establish wide ascendancies, were not sufficient to carry the resultant
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Speaker 1: unity beyond the political stage. There was unity, but not unification.
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Speaker 1: Tongues and writing ceased to be pure without ceasing to
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Speaker 1: be distinct. Sympathies, religious and social practices ran apart and
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Speaker 1: rounded themselves off like drops of oil on water. Travel
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Speaker 1: was restricted to the rulers and the troops, and to
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Speaker 1: a wealthy leisure class. Commerce was for most of the
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Speaker 1: constituent provinces of the Empire are commerce and superficialities, and
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Speaker 1: each province, except for Italy, which latterly became dependent on
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Speaker 1: an overseas food supply, was in all essential things autonomous.
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Speaker 1: Could have continued in existence rulers and ruled, arts, luxuries,
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Speaker 1: and refinements just as they stood if all other lands
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Speaker 1: and customs had been swept out of being local convulsions
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Speaker 1: and revolutions, conquests and developments occurred. Indeed, But though the
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Speaker 1: stones were altered, the mosaic remained, and the general size
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Speaker 1: and character of its constituent pieces remained. So it was
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Speaker 1: under the Romans, so it was in the eighteenth century,
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Speaker 1: and so it would probably have remained as long as
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Speaker 1: the post road and the sailing ship were the most
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Speaker 1: rapid forms of transit with theses the reach of man.
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Speaker 1: Wars and powers and princes came and went. That was all.
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Speaker 1: Nothing was changed. There was only one state, more or less.
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Speaker 1: Even in the eighteenth century, the process of real unification
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Speaker 1: had affected so little that not one of the larger
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Speaker 1: kingdoms of Europe escaped a civil war, not a class war,
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Speaker 1: but a really internal war between one part of itself
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Speaker 1: and another. In that one hundred years, in spite of
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Speaker 1: Rome's few centuries of unstable empire, internal wars, a perpetual
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Speaker 1: struggle against finally triumphant disruptions, seemed to be the unavoidable
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Speaker 1: destiny of every power that attempted to rule over a
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Speaker 1: larger radius than at most one hundred miles. So evident
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Speaker 1: was this that many educated English persons thought then, and
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Speaker 1: many who are not in the habit of analyzing operating
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Speaker 1: causes still think to day that the wide diffusion of
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Speaker 1: the English speaking people is a mere preliminary to their political, social,
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Speaker 1: and linguistic disruption. The eighteenth century breach with the United
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Speaker 1: States is made a precedent of and the unification that
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Speaker 1: follow the War of Union and the growing unification of Canada,
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Speaker 1: is overlooked that linguistic differences, differences of custom, costume, prejudice,
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Speaker 1: and the like, will finally make the Australian the Canadian
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Speaker 1: of English blood, the Virginian and the English Africander as
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Speaker 1: incomprehensible and unsympathetic one to another, as Spaniard and Englishmen,
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Speaker 1: or Frenchmen and German are now. On such a supposition.
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Speaker 1: All our current imperialism is the most foolish defiance of
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Speaker 1: the inevitable, the maddest waste of blood, treasure and emotion
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Speaker 1: that man ever made. So indeed, it might be so. Indeed,
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Speaker 1: I certainly think it would be if it were not
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Speaker 1: that the epoch of post road and sailing ship is
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Speaker 1: at an end. We are in the beginning of a
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Speaker 1: new time, with such forces of organization and unification at
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Speaker 1: work in mechanical traction, in the telephone and telegraph, in
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Speaker 1: the whole wonderland of novel space, destroying appliances, and in
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Speaker 1: the correlated inevitable advance and practical education, as the world
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Speaker 1: has never felt before. The operation of these unifying forces
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Speaker 1: is already to be very distinctly traced in the Czech
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Speaker 1: the arrest and deed of any further differentiation in existing tongues,
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Speaker 1: even in the most widely spread. In fact, it is
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Speaker 1: more than an arrest. Even the forces of differentiation have
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Speaker 1: been driven back, and an actual process of assimilation has
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Speaker 1: set in. In England, at the commencement of the nineteenth century,
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Speaker 1: the common man of Somerset and the common man of Yorkshire,
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Speaker 1: the Sussex peasant, the Caithness cottar and the common ulstermen
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Speaker 1: would have been almost incomprehensible to one another. They differed
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Speaker 1: an accent in idiom and in their very names for things.
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Speaker 1: They differed in their ideas about things. They were in
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Speaker 1: plain English foreigners one to another. Now they differ only
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Speaker 1: in accent, and even that is a dwindling difference. Their
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Speaker 1: language has become ampler because now they read, They read books,
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Speaker 1: or at any rate they learn to read out of books,
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Speaker 1: and certainly they read newspapers and those scrappy periodicals that
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Speaker 1: people like bishops pretend to think so detrimental to the
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Speaker 1: human mind, periodicals that it is cheaper to make its
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Speaker 1: centers and uniformly than locally in accordance with local needs.
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Speaker 1: Since the newspaper cannot fit the locality, the locality has
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Speaker 1: to broaden its mind to the newspaper and to ideas
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Speaker 1: acceptable in other localities. The word in the idiom of
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Speaker 1: the literary language and the pronunciation suggested by its spelling
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Speaker 1: tends to prevail over the local usage. And moreover, there
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Speaker 1: is a persistent mixing of people going on migration in
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Speaker 1: search of employment and so on, quite unprecedented before the
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Speaker 1: railways came. Few people are content to remain in that
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Speaker 1: locality and state of life into which it has pleased
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Speaker 1: God to call them. As a result, dialectic purity has vanished.
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Speaker 1: Dialects are rapidly vanishing, and novel differentiations are retarded or
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Speaker 1: arrested Altogether. Such novelties as do establish themselves in a
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Speaker 1: locality are widely disseminated almost at once in books and periodicals.
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Speaker 1: A parallel arrest of dialectic separation has happened in France,
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Speaker 1: in Italy, in Germany, and in the States. It is
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Speaker 1: not a process peculiar to any one nation. It is
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Speaker 1: simply an aspect of the general process that has arisen
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Speaker 1: out of mechanical locomotion. The organization of elementary education has
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Speaker 1: no doubt been an important factor. But the essential influence
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Speaker 1: working through this circumstance is the fact that paper is
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Speaker 1: relatively cheap to typesetting and both cheap to authorship. Even
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Speaker 1: the commonest sorts of authorship, and the wider the area
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Speaker 1: a periodical or books serves, the bigger, more attractive, and
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Speaker 1: better it can be made for the same money. And
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Speaker 1: clearly this process of assimilation will continue even local differences
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Speaker 1: of accent seem likely to follow. The itinerant dramatic company,
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Speaker 1: the itinerant preacher, the coming extension of telephones, and the phonograph,
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Speaker 1: which at any time, in some application to correspondence or
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Speaker 1: instruction may cease to be a toy. All these things
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Speaker 1: attack or threaten to attack, the weeds of differentiation before
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Speaker 1: they can take root. And this process is not restricted
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Speaker 1: to dialects merely. The native of a small country who
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Speaker 1: knows no other language than the tongue of his country
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Speaker 1: becomes increasingly at a disadvantage in comparison with the user
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Speaker 1: of any of the three great languages of the europeanized world.
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Speaker 1: For his literature, he depends on the scanty writers who
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Speaker 1: are in his own case and write or have written
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Speaker 1: in his own tongue. Necessarily they are few, because necessarily
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Speaker 1: with a small public there can be only subsistence for
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Speaker 1: a few for his science. He is in a worst case.
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Speaker 1: His country can produce neither teachers nor discoveries to compare
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Speaker 1: with the numbers of such workers in the larger areas,
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Speaker 1: and it will neither pay them to write original matter
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Speaker 1: for his instruction, nor to translate what has been written
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Speaker 1: in other tongues. The larger the number of people reading
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Speaker 1: a tongue, the larger, other things being equal, will be
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Speaker 1: not only the output of more or less original literature
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Speaker 1: in that tongue, but also the more profitable and numerous
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Speaker 1: will be translations of whatever has value in other tongues. Moreover,
20:36
Speaker 1: the larger the reading public in any language, the cheaper
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Speaker 1: will it be to supply copies of the desired work.
20:42
Speaker 1: In the matter of current intelligence, the case of the
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Speaker 1: speaker of the small language is still worse. His newspaper
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Speaker 1: will need to be cheaply served, His home intelligence will
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Speaker 1: be cut and restricted, his foreign news belated and second hand. Moreover,
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Speaker 1: to travel even a little distance, or to conduct anything
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Speaker 1: but the smallest business enterprise will be exceptionally inconvenient to him.
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Speaker 1: The Englishman, who knows no language but his own may
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Speaker 1: travel well nigh all over the world, and everywhere meets
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Speaker 1: someone who can speak his tongue. But what of the
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Speaker 1: Welsh speaking Welshman, What of the Basque and the Lithuanian,
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Speaker 1: who can speak only his mother tongue everywhere? Such a
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Speaker 1: man is a foreigner, and with all that foreigner's disadvantages,
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Speaker 1: in most places he is, for all practical purposes, deaf
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Speaker 1: and dumb. The inducements to an Englishman, Frenchman or German
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Speaker 1: to become biilingual are great enough nowadays, but the inducements
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Speaker 1: to a speaker of the smaller languages are rapidly approaching compulsion.
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Speaker 1: He must do it in self defense. To be an
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Speaker 1: educated man in his own vernacular has become an impossibility.
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Speaker 1: He must either become a mental subject of one of
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Speaker 1: the greater languages, or sink to the intellectual status of
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Speaker 1: a peasant. But if our analysis of social development was correct,
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Speaker 1: the peasant of today will be represented tomorrow by the
22:03
Speaker 1: people of no account, whatever the classes of extinction, the
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Speaker 1: people of the abyss. If that analysis was correct, the
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Speaker 1: essential nation will be all of educated men. That is
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Speaker 1: to say, the essential nation will speak some dominant language,
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Speaker 1: or cease to exist. Whatever its primordial tongue may have been,
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Speaker 1: it will pass out of being and become a mere
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Speaker 1: local area of the lower social stratum. A problem for
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Speaker 1: the philanthropic amateur. The action of the force of attraction
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Speaker 1: of the great tongues is cumulative. It goes on as
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Speaker 1: bodies fall, with a steady acceleration. The more the great
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Speaker 1: tongues prevail over the little languages, the less will be
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Speaker 1: the inducement to write and translate into these latter, the
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Speaker 1: less the inducement to master them with any care or precision.
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Speaker 1: And so this attack upon the smaller tongues, this gravitation
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Speaker 1: of those who are born to speak them towards the
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Speaker 1: great languages, is not only to be seen going on
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Speaker 1: in the case of such languages as Flemish, Welsh or Basque,
23:04
Speaker 1: but even in the case of Norwegian, and of such
23:06
Speaker 1: great and noble tongue as the Italian. I am afraid
23:09
Speaker 1: that the trend of things makes for a similar suppression
23:13
Speaker 1: all over Italy is the French newspaper and the French book.
23:17
Speaker 1: French wins its way more and more there as English,
23:20
Speaker 1: I understand as doing in Norway, and English and German
23:23
Speaker 1: in Holland. And in the coming years, when the reading
23:26
Speaker 1: public will, in the case of the Western nations be
23:28
Speaker 1: practically the whole functional population, when travel will be more
23:33
Speaker 1: extensive and abundant, and the interchange of printed matters still
23:36
Speaker 1: cheaper and swifter, And above all, with the spread of
23:39
Speaker 1: the telephone, the process of subtle, bloodless, unpremeditated annexation will
23:45
Speaker 1: conceivably progress much more rapidly even than it does at present.
23:50
Speaker 1: The twentieth century will see the effectual crowding out of
23:53
Speaker 1: most of the weaker languages, if not a positive crowding out,
23:57
Speaker 1: yet at least, as in Flanders, a supplementing of them
24:00
Speaker 1: by the superposition of one or other of a limited
24:04
Speaker 1: number of world languages over the area in which each
24:07
Speaker 1: is spoken. This will go on not only in Europe,
24:11
Speaker 1: but with varying rates of progress and local eddies and interruptions,
24:14
Speaker 1: over the whole world, except in the special case of
24:18
Speaker 1: China and Japan, where there may be a unique development.
24:21
Speaker 1: The peoples of the world will escape from the wreckage
24:24
Speaker 1: of their two small and swamped and foundering social systems
24:28
Speaker 1: only up the ladders of what one may call the
24:30
Speaker 1: aggregating tongues. What will these aggregating world languages be? If
24:37
Speaker 1: one has regard only to its extension during the nineteenth century,
24:41
Speaker 1: one may easily incline to overrate the probabilities of English
24:44
Speaker 1: becoming the chief of these. But a great part of
24:47
Speaker 1: the vast extension of English that has occurred has been
24:50
Speaker 1: due to the rapid reproduction of originally English speaking peoples,
24:54
Speaker 1: the emigration of foreigners into English speaking countries, and quantities
24:57
Speaker 1: too small to resist, the contagion and the compulsion due
25:02
Speaker 1: to the political and commercial preponderance of a people too
25:05
Speaker 1: illiterate to readily master strange tongues. None of these causes
25:09
Speaker 1: have any essential permanence. When one comes to look more
25:13
Speaker 1: closely into the question, one is surprised to discover how
25:16
Speaker 1: slow the extension of English has been in the face
25:19
Speaker 1: of apparently far less convenient tongues. English still fails to
25:23
Speaker 1: replace the French language in French Canada, and its ascendancy
25:27
Speaker 1: is doubtful today in South Africa, after nearly a century
25:31
Speaker 1: of British dominion, it has none of the contagious quality
25:34
Speaker 1: of French, and the small class that monopolizes the direction
25:38
Speaker 1: of British affairs, and probably will monopolize it. Yet for
25:41
Speaker 1: several decades has never displayed any great zeal to propagate
25:45
Speaker 1: its use of the few ideas possessed by the British
25:49
Speaker 1: governing class. The destruction and discouragement of schools and colleges
25:53
Speaker 1: is unfortunately one of the chief and there is an
25:56
Speaker 1: absolute incapacity to understand the political significance of the language question.
26:01
Speaker 1: The Hindu, who is at pains to learn and use English,
26:05
Speaker 1: encounters something uncommonly like hatred disguised in a facetious form.
26:10
Speaker 1: He will certainly read little about himself in English that
26:13
Speaker 1: is not grossly contemptuous to reward him for his labour.
26:17
Speaker 1: The possibilities that have existed, and that do still in
26:20
Speaker 1: a dwindling degree exist for resolute statesmen to make English
26:24
Speaker 1: the common language of communication for all Asia south and
26:27
Speaker 1: east of the Himalayas will have to develop of their
26:30
Speaker 1: own force, or dwindle and pass away. They may quite
26:34
Speaker 1: probably pass away. There is no sign that either the
26:38
Speaker 1: English or the Americans have a sufficient sense of the
26:41
Speaker 1: importance of linguistic predominance in the future of their race
26:45
Speaker 1: to interfere with natural processes in this matter for many
26:49
Speaker 1: years to come. Among peoples not actually subject to British
26:54
Speaker 1: or American rule, and who are neither waiters nor commercial travelers,
26:58
Speaker 1: the inducements to learn English rather than French or German
27:02
Speaker 1: do not increase. If our initial assumptions are right. The
27:06
Speaker 1: decisive factor in this matter is the amount of science
27:08
Speaker 1: and thought the acquisition of a language will afford the
27:11
Speaker 1: man who learns it. It becomes therefore a fact of
27:15
Speaker 1: very great significance that the actual number of books published
27:18
Speaker 1: in English is less than that in French or German,
27:21
Speaker 1: and that the proportion of serious books is very greatly less.
27:25
Speaker 1: A large proportion of English books and novels adapted to
27:28
Speaker 1: the minds of women, or of boys and superannuated businessmen,
27:32
Speaker 1: stories designed rather to allay than stimulate thought. They are
27:37
Speaker 1: the only books, indeed, that are profitable to publisher and
27:39
Speaker 1: author alike. In this connection they do not count. However,
27:44
Speaker 1: no foreigner is likely to learn English for the pleasure
27:47
Speaker 1: of reading Miss Marie Corelli in the original or of
27:51
Speaker 1: drinking untranslatable elements from the helmet of Navae. The present
27:56
Speaker 1: conditions of book production for the English reading public often
27:59
Speaker 1: no of any immediate change. In this respect, there is
28:03
Speaker 1: neither honor nor reward. There is not even food or
28:06
Speaker 1: shelter for the American or Englishman who devotes a year
28:09
Speaker 1: or so of his life to the adequate treatment of
28:11
Speaker 1: any spacious question. And so small is the English reading
28:14
Speaker 1: public with any special interest in science, that a great
28:18
Speaker 1: number of important foreign scientific works are never translated into
28:21
Speaker 1: English at all. Such interesting compilations as Bloch's work on War,
28:26
Speaker 1: for example, must be read in French. In English only
28:30
Speaker 1: a brief summary of his results is to be obtained
28:32
Speaker 1: under a sensational heading footnote is war now impossible? And
28:39
Speaker 1: see also footnote page two ten end footnote Schopenhauer again
28:46
Speaker 1: is only to be got quite stupidly, boldlyrized, explained, and selected.
28:52
Speaker 1: In English. Many translations that are made into English are
28:55
Speaker 1: made only to sell. They are too often the work
28:58
Speaker 1: of sweated women and girls, very often quite without any
29:01
Speaker 1: special knowledge of the matter they translate. They are difficult
29:04
Speaker 1: to read and untrustworthy to quote. The production of books
29:08
Speaker 1: in English except the author be a wealthy amateur, rests
29:12
Speaker 1: finally upon the publishers, and publishers to day stand a
29:15
Speaker 1: little lower than ordinary tradesmen in not caring at all
29:18
Speaker 1: whether the goods they sell are good or bad. Unusual
29:22
Speaker 1: books they allege, and all good books are unusual, are
29:26
Speaker 1: difficult to handle, and the author must pay the fine,
29:30
Speaker 1: amounting more often than not to the greater portion of
29:33
Speaker 1: his interest in the book. There is no criticism to
29:36
Speaker 1: control the advertising enterprises of publishers and authors, and no
29:40
Speaker 1: sufficiently intelligent reading public has differentiated out of the confusion
29:44
Speaker 1: to encourage attempts at critical discrimination. The organs of the
29:48
Speaker 1: great professions and technical trades are as yet not alive
29:52
Speaker 1: to the part their readers must play in the public
29:54
Speaker 1: life of the future, and ignore all but strictly technical publications.
30:00
Speaker 1: A bastard criticism, written in many cases by publishers employees,
30:04
Speaker 1: a criticism having a very direct relation to the advertisement
30:07
Speaker 1: columns attributes praise and blame in the periodic press. There
30:12
Speaker 1: is no body of great men, either in England or America,
30:16
Speaker 1: no intelligence in the British court that might, by any
30:19
Speaker 1: form of recognition, compensate the philosophical or scientific writer for
30:24
Speaker 1: poverty and popular neglect. The more powerful a man's intelligence,
30:29
Speaker 1: the more distinctly he must see that to devote himself.
30:32
Speaker 1: To increase the scientific or philosophical wealth of the English
30:35
Speaker 1: tongue will be to sacrifice comfort, the respect of the
30:39
Speaker 1: bulk of his contemporaries, and all the most delightful things
30:42
Speaker 1: of life for the barren reward of a not very
30:45
Speaker 1: certain righteous self applause by brewing and dealing in tied
30:50
Speaker 1: houses footnote. It is entirely for their wealth that brewers
30:56
Speaker 1: have been ennobled in England, never because of their services
30:58
Speaker 1: as captains of a rate industry. Indeed, these services have
31:02
Speaker 1: been typically poor. While those men were earning their peerages
31:06
Speaker 1: by the sort of proceedings that do secure men peerages
31:09
Speaker 1: under the British crown, the German brewers were developing the
31:12
Speaker 1: art and science of brewing with remarkable energy and success.
31:16
Speaker 1: The Germans and Bohemians can now make light beers that
31:20
Speaker 1: the English brewers cannot even imitate. They are exporting beer
31:24
Speaker 1: to England in steadily increasing volume end footnote. By brewing
31:29
Speaker 1: and dealing in tired houses, or by selling pork and tea,
31:33
Speaker 1: or by stock jobbing, and by pandering with the profits
31:35
Speaker 1: so obtained to the pleasures of the established grate, A
31:39
Speaker 1: man of energy may hope to rise to a pitch
31:42
Speaker 1: of public honor and popularity immeasurably in excess of anything
31:46
Speaker 1: attainable through the most splendid intellectual performances. Heaven forbid, I
31:51
Speaker 1: should overrate public honors and the company of princes. But
31:54
Speaker 1: it is not always delightful to be splashed by the
31:57
Speaker 1: wheels of cabs. Before there has been at least a
32:02
Speaker 1: convention that the court of this country and its aristocracy
32:05
Speaker 1: were radiant centers of moral and intellectual influence. That they did,
32:09
Speaker 1: to some extent check and correct the judgments of the
32:12
Speaker 1: cab rank and the beer house. But the British Crown
32:17
Speaker 1: of today, so far as it exists for science and
32:20
Speaker 1: literature at all, exists mainly to repudiate the claims of
32:23
Speaker 1: intellectual performance to public respect. End of chapter seven. A
32:30
Speaker 1: recording by John Treviivick