nch was spoken by far
more people than English; at the present day French is only just keeping
up its numbers in France, is losing in Canada and the United States, is
not advancing to any extent in Africa. English is spoken by a hundred
million people in Europe and America; is over-running Africa; has
annexed Australasia and the Pacific Isles; has ousted, or is ousting,
Dutch at the Cape, French in Louisiana, even Spanish itself in Florida,
California, New Mexico. In Egyptian mud villages, the aspiring Copt, who
once learnt French, now learns English. In Scandinavia, our tongue gains
ground daily. Everywhere in the world it takes the lead among the
European languages, and by the middle of the next century will no doubt
be spoken over half the globe by a cosmopolitan mass of five hundred
million people.

And all on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue,
and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is the
easiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbish
of genders; simplified immensely its declensions and conjugations;
thrown overboard most of the nonsensical ballast we know as grammar. It
is only weighted now by its grotesque and ridiculous spelling--one of
the absurdest among all the absurd English attempts at compromise. The
pressure of the newer speakers will compel it to make jetsam of that
lumber also; and then the tongue of Shelley and Newton will march onward
unopposed to the conquest of humanity.

I pen these remarks, I hope, "without prejudice." Patriotism is a vulgar
vice of which I have never been guilty.

II.

_IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY._

Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always
consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to
the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation
and morals than the democracy they live among.

I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of people
at large (and especially of that particular European people which
"dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies and
democracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a common
though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the
aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners,
than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a
boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his