pendent States, but
economically it must become one in the next fifty years. It will almost
certainly be the greatest urban region in all the world except that
which will arise in the eastern States of North America, and that which
may arise somewhere about Hankow. It will stretch from Lille to Kiel, it
will drive extensions along the Rhine valley into Switzerland, and fling
an arm along the Moldau to Prague, it will be the industrial capital of
the old world. Paris will be its West End, and it will stretch a
spider's web of railways and great roads of the new sort over the whole
continent. Even when the coal-field industries of the plain give place
to the industrial application of mountain-born electricity, this great
city region will remain, I believe, in its present position at the
seaport end of the great plain of the Old World. Considerations of
transit will keep it where it has grown, and electricity will be brought
to it in mighty cables from the torrents of the central European
mountain mass. Its westward port may be Bordeaux or Milford Haven, or
even some port in the south-west of Ireland--unless, which is very
unlikely, the velocity of secure sea-travel can be increased beyond that
of land locomotion. I do not see how this great region is to unify
itself without some linguistic compromise--the Germanization of the
French-speaking peoples by force is too ridiculous a suggestion to
entertain. Almost inevitably with travel, with transport communications,
with every condition of human convenience insisting upon it, formally or
informally a bi-lingual compromise will come into operation, and to my
mind at least the chances seem even that French will emerge on the upper
hand. Unless, indeed, that great renascence of the English-speaking
peoples should, after all, so overwhelmingly occur as to force this
European city to be tri-lingual, and prepare the way by which the whole
world may at last speak together in one tongue.

These are the aggregating tongues. I do not think that any other tongues
than these are quite likely to hold their own in the coming time.
Italian may flourish in the city of the Po valley, but only with French
beside it. Spanish and Russian are mighty languages, but without a
reading public how can they prevail, and what prospect of a reading
public has either? They are, I believe, already judged. By A.D. 2000 all
these languages will be tending more and more to be the second tongues
of bi-lingual