Especially do the Orientals require an easy means of intercourse with Occidentals, who will never make any attempt to master Asiatic tongues. An easy auxiliary language which shall avail the Pekin merchant in dealing with Frenchman or Turk or Russian, in filling orders for Brazil or Boston or New Zealand, has become a necessity not only for business, but for world peace. It would be of immense service to scientists and scholars, creating an instant acquaintance with the achievements by their compeers in every land. Especially would the citizens of the smaller nations, the Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Roumanian, etc., appreciate the power of communication with the great world without the necessity of devoting their school-days so largely to the mastery of many languages. With the increase of scientific knowledge and the enlargement of school curricula, economy of time is increasingly demanded. The common, crude objection, that an auxiliary language would be artificial and that all live languages must arise spontaneously, is as absurd as an objection to a straight, smooth Roman road because it is not so natural and therefore interesting as a muddy, meandering cowpath. For those who have burdens to bear and must speed onward because the king's business requires haste, the road that has no obstacles must be chosen. The leisurely, privileged classes may still deviate into dozens of picturesque, philological by-paths and learn all the languages that they do now; but for the workaday world the barrier which makes men deaf and dumb must be removed if prejudice, misunderstanding, and jealous rivalries are to diminish and world organisation become effective in promoting peace and good-will. Esperantists are emancipated from provincialism in thought. They breathe a higher air and gaze on a wider horizon than their fellows. At their annual conventions, they worship in Protestant and Roman Catholic churches in their common tongue, they act plays in which each actor comes from a different nation, they play and sing and talk together with an abandon and enthusiasm which no other international gatherings ever show, gatherings where the interpreters are always in evidence with wearisome translations and each little national group flocks by itself, able at most to converse with only two or three other groups except through the medium of some common language difficult for all. Whether the auxiliary language of the future be Esperanto or some better language, the necessity for some auxiliary language is no longer a matter of question.1 CHAPTER XV WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, HAS BEEN, AND WILL BE ACHIEVED THREE HREE weeks before Paul Kruger's "ultimatum, Joseph Chamberlain refused to refer the South African difficulties to an arbitration board of two Dutch and three British chief justices. Had he done so, England would have saved three years of bitterness, a setback to all local progress and reform, and the hatred of a people who lost 20,000 women and children in concentration camps; she would have saved $1,100,000,000, which might have given that third of England's population who are living in dire poverty on less than $6 a week per family all of the following things: 100 Old People's Homes, at $100,000 each. 150,000 Workingmen's Houses, at $2000 each. Two years after the war, England was paying $400,000 a week to keep up her army in South Africa, while one quarter of her own people at home went hungry. To-day Russia is buying battleships, while millions of her people starve.1 Glen The National Bureau of Education in 1910 asked Congress for an additional appropriation of $75,000, to enable it to meet constantly growing demands and opportunities for service. It got $7600-about one tenth of what it asked. Edwards, of the Russell Sage Foundation, was prompted by this parsimony to the following pregnant and startling word in the Journal of Education: In no other department of national activity has advance been so slow and difficult as in that which is represented by the Bureau of Education. It has tried year after year for nearly fifty years to win the favour of an unsympathetic Congress. This it has failed absolutely to do, A few weeks ago one of the most stupendous engines of war ever built by civilised man slid over the ways and into the water at Norfolk, Va. She will carry in her main battery 12 twelve-inch guns, valued at $720,000; or more than enough to pay the salaries of the entire force now employed in the Bureau of Education for twelve years. She will carry 21 five-inch guns, valued at $193,200; or more than enough to employ a force of ten field specialists in education for six years. She will cost the nation $9,000,000 in See the author's Primer of the Peace Movement. repairs and maintenance in 20 years; or nearly three and one half times as much as the bureau has cost the government in more than 40 years. At the end of 20 years she will have depreciated in value 100 per cent., and will have cost the nation to build and support in time of peace not less than $20,000,000; or nearly four and one half times as much as the work of the bureau, including the Alaska service, has cost in more than four decades. Have we anything to show what this war vessel really means? In the filthy mud of a foreign port lies her prototype, a grisly, forsaken memorial to wicked sacrifices of human life, misuse of man's most heroic qualities, wounds, greed, starvation, disease, suffering, sorrow, grief, and the widows and the orphans of civilised nations. This is what it all means in the last analysis. As these facts drive their way to our hearts, is it a pleasant thing to learn that, while the whole country is alive to the need of a fuller knowledge concerning facts of human life and happiness, there are men who refuse $75,000 to the Bureau of Education, and permit themselves a few days later to grace with pomp and ceremony the launching of an $11,000,000 battleship? One day in the spring of 1910, a man of power, on whom the eyes of the civilised globe were centred, had in his hands the greatest opportunity ever vouchsafed to mortal to fire the imagination and enthusiasm of Christendom, and become par excellence the Peacemaker of the world. He had held the highest office in one of the richest and most powerful of nations; he had by his commanding personality fascinated the youth of every land; he |