and swamped and foundering social systems, only up the
ladders of what one may call the aggregating tongues.

What will these aggregating world-languages be? If one has regard only
to its extension during the nineteenth century one may easily incline to
overrate the probabilities of English becoming the chief of these. But a
great part of the vast extension of English that has occurred has been
due to the rapid reproduction of originally English-speaking peoples,
the emigration of foreigners into English-speaking countries in
quantities too small to resist the contagion about them, and the
compulsion due to the political and commercial preponderance of a
people too illiterate to readily master strange tongues. None of these
causes have any essential permanence. When one comes to look more
closely into the question one is surprised to discover how slow the
extension of English has been in the face of apparently far less
convenient tongues. English still fails to replace the French language
in French Canada, and its ascendency is doubtful to-day in South Africa,
after nearly a century of British dominion. It has none of the
contagious quality of French, and the small class that monopolizes the
direction of British affairs, and probably will monopolize it yet for
several decades, has never displayed any great zeal to propagate its
use. Of the few ideas possessed by the British governing class, the
destruction and discouragement of schools and colleges is,
unfortunately, one of the chief, and there is an absolute incapacity to
understand the political significance of the language question. The
Hindoo who is at pains to learn and use English encounters something
uncommonly like hatred disguised in a facetious form. He will certainly
read little about himself in English that is not grossly contemptuous,
to reward him for his labour. The possibilities that have existed, and
that do still in a dwindling degree exist, for resolute statesmen to
make English the common language of communication for all Asia south and
east of the Himalayas, will have to develop of their own force or
dwindle and pass away. They may quite probably pass away. There is no
sign that either the English or the Americans have a sufficient sense of
the importance of linguistic predominance in the future of their race to
interfere with natural processes in this matter for many years to come.

Among peoples not actually subject to British or American rule, an