gion, and
there was room for them all. That emigration may have been as
long a process as that of the Europeans in our own time to
America; probably it was; or longer. But it happened, at any
rate, a million years ago; and in a million years a deal of
water will flow under the bridges. You may call English
a universal language now; it might conceivably become so
absolutely, after a few centuries. But history will go on and
time, and the cyclic changes inherent in natural law. These are
not to be dodged by railways, turbines, aeroplanes; you cannot
evitate their action by inventing printing-presses;--which, I
suppose, have been invented and forgotten dozens of times 'since
created man.' In a million years from now the world will have
contracted and expanded often. We have seen, in our little period
called historical, hardly anything but expansion; though there
have been contractions, too. But contractions there will be,
major ones; it is quite safe to foretell that; because action
and reaction are equal and opposite: it is a fundamental law.
Geography will re-become, what it was in the times we call
ancient, an esoteric science; the races will be isolated, and
there will be no liners on the seas, and Europe and Asia
will be fabulous realms of faerie for our more or less remote
descendants. Then what will have become of the once universal
English language?--It will have split into a thousand fragment
tongues, as unlike as Dutch and Sanskrit; and philology--the
great expansion having happened again--will have as much
confusion to unravel in the Brito-Yankish, as it has now in the
Indo-European.--In a million years?--Bless my soul, in a poor
little hundred thousand!

The Aryan languages, since they began to be, have been spreading
out and retreating, mixing and changing and interchanging; one
imposed on another, hidden under another, and recrudescing
through another; through ten or a hundred thousand years,--or
however long it may be; just as they have been doing in
historical times. You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian
come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through
English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic,
and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek;
Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and
conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts.
Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a
momentary aspect