al spelling. Are people likely to overcome these
very serious difficulties in the future, and, if so, how will they do
it? And what prospects are there of a _lingua franca_?

Wherever one looks closely into the causes and determining influences of
the great convulsions of this time, one is more and more impressed by
the apparent smallness of the ultimate directing influence. It seems to
me at least that it is a practically proven thing that this vast
aggression of Germany is to be traced back to a general tone of court
thinking and discussion in the Prussia of the eighteenth century, to
the theories of a few professors and the gathering trend of German
education in a certain direction. It seems to me that similarly the
language teachers of to-day and to-morrow may hold in their hands the
seeds of gigantic international developments in the future.

It is not a question of the skill or devotion of individual teachers so
much as of the possibility of organising them upon a grand scale. An
individual teacher must necessarily use the ordinary books and ordinary
spelling and type of the language in which he is giving instruction; he
may get a few elementary instruction books from a private publisher,
specially printed for teaching purposes, but very speedily he finds
himself obliged to go to the current printed matter. This, as I will
immediately show, bars the most rapid and fruitful method of teaching.
And in this as in most affairs, private enterprise, the individualistic
system, shows itself a failure. In England, for example, the choice of
Russian lesson books is poor and unsatisfactory, and there is either no
serviceable Russian-English, English-Russian school dictionary in
existence, or it is published so badly as to be beyond the range of my
inquiries. But a state, or a group of universities, or even a rich
private association such as far-seeing American, French and British
business men might be reasonably expected to form, could attack the
problem of teaching a language in an altogether different fashion.

The difficulty in teaching English lies in the inconsistency of the
spelling, and the consequent difficulties of pronunciation. If there
were available an ample series of text-books, reading books, and books
of general interest, done in a consistent phonetic type and spelling--in
which the value of the letters of the phonetic system followed as far as
possible the prevalent usage in Europe--the difficulty in teach