t year of school; many of them could make
immediate use of Esperanto on entering business; most of them would
probably get enough of the language during the last session at school
to engage them to keep up the practice afterwards according to local
opportunities.

Please do not judge of this probability by your experience with other
languages, which most students drop as soon as possible. Their endless
complications make the study and practice irksome and futile, while
Esperanto is positively fascinating.

In my opinion two lessons of 45 minutes a week would amply suffice to
secure practical results never dreamed of in the French, German, or
Spanish classes. After a very short course of study, the boys and girls
would get an opportunity to correspond with scholars of their own age
and station in many lands. There are even now hundreds of school boys
and girls in France, Germany, Austria, Spain, and even in China and
Japan eager for such interchange of thoughts by means of Esperanto.

The hour or hour and a half spent weekly on this subject would be amply
repaid by the increased intelligence and linguistic feeling of the
pupils, and ultimately the subject could be taught with great benefit to
the whole school, doing away with the necessity of ineffectual attempts
at teaching foreign languages to all and sundry, regardless of taste and
capacity.

(6) Perhaps a few remarks may be in place here to substantiate still
more clearly the postulate that Esperanto fulfills absolutely the ideal
requirement of a language that means to be introduced throughout the
world as a secondary or auxiliary language: Facility of acquirement to
all nations.

(a) There is not one difficult sound, such as our th, our obscure
vowels, the French nasals, the German ae, oe, ue, etc. The vowels are a,
e, i, o, and u. Each has but one sound value, and that long and full,
approximately as in the phrase: "Pa may we go, too?"

(b) The tonic accent, an insuperable difficulty in English, on account
of its irregularity and elusiveness, is in Esperanto invariably on the
last vowel but one.

(c) The grammar is reduced to a minimum, the whole mechanism of
Esperanto being compassed within 16 rules which any one can grasp and
assimilate inside one hour.

(d) The vocabulary is extremely small, less than 1,000 roots, mostly
common to every Aryan tongue, being sufficient for all ordinary purposes
of language.

This is due to the marvelously ingenious sys