ans and other
Mediterranean races, who all learn Spanish in the second generation. As
to the other dominant languages, the points in their favour are
different. Conquest and administrative needs are spreading Russian over
the steppes of Asia; the Arab merchant and the growth of Mahommedanism
are importing Arabic far into the heart of Africa; the Chinaman is
carrying his own monosyllables with him to California, Australia,
Singapore. These tongues in future will divide the world between them.

The German who leaves Germany becomes an Anglo-American. The Italian who
leaves Italy becomes a Spanish-American.

There is another and still more striking way of looking at the rapid
increase of English. No other language will carry you through so many
ports in the world. It suffices for London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast,
Southampton, Cardiff; for New York, Boston, Montreal, Charleston, New
Orleans, San Francisco; for Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Hong Kong,
Yokohama, Honolulu; for Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kurrachi, Singapore,
Colombo, Cape Town, Mauritius. Spanish with Cadiz, Barcelona, Havana,
Callao, Valparaiso, cannot touch that record; nor can French with
Marseilles, Bordeaux, Havre, Algiers, Antwerp, Tahiti. The most
commercially useful language in the world, thus widely diffused in so
many great mercantile and shipping centres, is certain to win in the
struggle for existence among the tongues of the future.

The old Mediterranean civilisation teaches us a useful lesson in this
respect. Two languages dominated the Mediterranean basin. The East spoke
Greek, not because Plato and AEschylus spoke Greek, but because Greek was
the tongue of the great commercial centres--of Athens, Syracuse,
Alexandria, Antioch, Byzantium. The West spoke Latin, not because
Catullus and Virgil spoke Latin, but because Latin was the
administrative tongue, the tongue of Rome, of Italy, and later of Gaul,
of Spain, of the great towns in Dacia, Pannonia, Britain. Whoever wanted
to do anything on the big scale then, had to speak Greek or Latin; so
much so that the native languages of Gaul and Spain died utterly out,
and Latin dialects are now the spoken tongue in all southern Europe. In
our own time, again, educated Hindoos from different parts of India have
to use English as a means of intercommunication; and native merchants
must write their business correspondence with distant houses in English.
To put an extreme contrast: in the last century Fre