s of a
peasant. But if our analysis of social development was correct the
peasant of to-day will be represented to-morrow by the people of no
account whatever, the classes of extinction, the People of the Abyss.
If that analysis was correct, the essential nation will be all of
educated men, that is to say, the essential nation will speak some
dominant language or cease to exist, whatever its primordial tongue may
have been. It will pass out of being and become a mere local area of the
lower social stratum,--a Problem for the philanthropic amateur.

The action of the force of attraction of the great tongues is
cumulative. It goes on, as bodies fall, with a steady acceleration. The
more the great tongues prevail over the little languages the less will
be the inducement to write and translate into these latter, the less the
inducement to master them with any care or precision. And so this attack
upon the smaller tongues, this gravitation of those who are born to
speak them, towards the great languages, is not only to be seen going on
in the case of such languages as Flemish, Welsh, or Basque, but even in
the case of Norwegian and of such a great and noble tongue as the
Italian, I am afraid that the trend of things makes for a similar
suppression. All over Italy is the French newspaper and the French book.
French wins its way more and more there, as English, I understand, is
doing in Norway, and English and German in Holland. And in the coming
years when the reading public will, in the case of the Western nations,
be practically the whole functional population, when travel will be more
extensive and abundant, and the inter-change of printed matter still
cheaper and swifter--and above all with the spread of the telephone--the
process of subtle, bloodless, unpremeditated annexation will conceivably
progress much more rapidly even than it does at present. The Twentieth
Century will see the effectual crowding out of most of the weaker
languages--if not a positive crowding out, yet at least (as in Flanders)
a supplementing of them by the superposition of one or other of a
limited number of world-languages over the area in which each is spoken.
This will go on not only in Europe, but with varying rates of progress
and local eddies and interruptions over the whole world. Except in the
special case of China and Japan, where there may be a unique
development, the peoples of the world will escape from the wreckage of
their too small