h, which is losing all round;
while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill or
slightly retrograding. The world is now round. By the middle of the
twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant
speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate
of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of
mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern
hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay,
Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa
and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and
dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or
Danish in our own day.

And why? Not because Shakespeare wrote in English, but because the
English language has already got a firm hold of all those portions of
the earth's surface which are most absorbing the overflow of European
populations. Germans and Scandinavians and Russians emigrate by the
thousand now to all parts of the United States and the north-west of
Canada. In the first generation they may still retain their ancestral
speech; but their children have all to learn English. In Australia and
New Zealand the same thing is happening. In South Africa Dutch had got a
footing, it is true; but it is fast losing it. The newcomers learn
English, and though the elder Boers stick with Boer conservatism to
their native tongue, young Piet and young Paul find it pays them better
to know and speak the language of commerce--the language of Cape Town,
of Kimberley, of the future. The reason is the same throughout. Whenever
two tongues come to be spoken in the same area one of them is sure to be
more useful in business than the other. Every French-Canadian who wishes
to do things on a large scale is obliged to speak English. So is the
Creole in Louisiana; so earlier were the Knickerbocker Dutch in New
York. Once let English get in, and it beats all competing languages
fairly out of the field in a couple of generations.

Like influences favour Spanish in South America and elsewhere. English
has annexed most of North America, Australia, South Africa, the Pacific;
Spanish has annexed South America, Central America, the Philippines,
Cuba, and a few other places. For the most part these areas are less
suited than the English-speaking districts for colonisation by North
Europeans; but they absorb a large number of Itali