or threaten to attack, the weeds of differentiation before they
can take root....

And this process is not restricted to dialects merely. The native of a
small country who knows no other language than the tongue of his country
becomes increasingly at a disadvantage in comparison with the user of
any of the three great languages of the Europeanized world. For his
literature he depends on the scanty writers who are in his own case and
write, or have written, in his own tongue. Necessarily they are few,
because necessarily with a small public there can be only subsistence
for a few. For his science he is in a worse case. His country can
produce neither teachers nor discoverers to compare with the numbers of
such workers in the larger areas, and it will neither pay them to write
original matter for his instruction nor to translate what has been
written in other tongues. The larger the number of people reading a
tongue, the larger--other things being equal--will be not only the
output of more or less original literature in that tongue, but also the
more profitable and numerous will be translations of whatever has value
in other tongues. Moreover, the larger the reading public in any
language the cheaper will it be to supply copies of the desired work.
In the matter of current intelligence the case of the speaker of the
small language is still worse. His newspaper will need to be cheaply
served, his home intelligence will be cut and restricted, his foreign
news belated and second hand. Moreover, to travel even a little distance
or to conduct anything but the smallest business enterprise will be
exceptionally inconvenient to him. The Englishman who knows no language
but his own may travel well-nigh all over the world and everywhere meet
some one who can speak his tongue. But what of the Welsh-speaking
Welshman? What of the Basque and the Lithuanian who can speak only his
mother tongue? Everywhere such a man is a foreigner and with all the
foreigner's disadvantages. In most places he is for all practical
purposes deaf and dumb.

The inducements to an Englishman, Frenchman or German to become
bi-lingual are great enough nowadays, but the inducements to a speaker
of the smaller languages are rapidly approaching compulsion. He must do
it in self-defence. To be an educated man in his own vernacular has
become an impossibility, he must either become a mental subject of one
of the greater languages or sink to the intellectual statu