at, if a hint were
taken from the _Turbinia_ syndicate, a few enterprising persons of means
and intelligence might do much by private experiment to supplement and
replace the existing state of affairs.

VII

THE CONFLICT OF LANGUAGES

We have brought together thus far in these Anticipations the material
for the picture of a human community somewhere towards the year 2000. We
have imagined its roads, the type and appearance of its homes, its
social developments, its internal struggle for organization; we have
speculated upon its moral and aesthetic condition, read its newspaper,
made an advanced criticism upon the lack of universality in its
literature, and attempted to imagine it at war. We have decided in
particular that unlike the civilized community of the immediate past
which lived either in sharply-defined towns or agriculturally over a
wide country, this population will be distributed in a quite different
way, a little more thickly over vast urban regions and a little less
thickly over less attractive or less convenient or less industrial parts
of the world. And implicit in all that has been written there has
appeared an unavoidable assumption that the coming community will be
vast, something geographically more extensive than most, and
geographically different from almost all existing communities, that the
outline its creative forces will draw not only does not coincide with
existing political centres and boundaries, but will be more often than
not in direct conflict with them, uniting areas that are separated and
separating areas that are united, grouping here half a dozen tongues and
peoples together and there tearing apart homogeneous bodies and
distributing the fragments among separate groups. And it will now be
well to inquire a little into the general causes of these existing
divisions, the political boundaries of to-day, and the still older
contours of language and race.

It is first to be remarked that each of these sets of boundaries is
superposed, as it were, on the older sets. The race areas, for example,
which are now not traceable in Europe at all must have represented old
regions of separation; the language areas, which have little or no
essential relation to racial distribution, have also given way long
since to the newer forces that have united and consolidated nations. And
the still newer forces that have united and separated the nineteenth
century states have been, and in many cases