sh schools to
revive and perpetuate their several racial languages.

To those who, at this time, were looking forward to
world-organization and a universal peace through the medium of
a universal language, all this agitation had the appearance of
an anachronism, not to say a heresy. It seemed a deliberate
attempt to set up barriers, where progress demanded that they
should be torn down. The success of such a movement, it seemed,
must be to bring about a more complete isolation of the
peoples, to imprison them, so to speak, in their own languages,
and so cut them off from the general culture of Europe.[315]

The actual effect has been different from what was expected. It is
difficult, and for the masses of the people impossible, to learn through
the medium of a language that they do not speak. The results of the
efforts to cultivate Swedish and Russian in Finland, Polish and Russian
in Lithuania, Magyar in Slovakia and at the same time to prohibit the
publication of books and newspapers in the mother-tongue of the country
has been, in the first place, to create an artificial illiteracy and, in
the second, to create in the minds of native peoples a sense of social
and intellectual inferiority to the alien and dominant race.

The effect of the literary revival of the spoken language, however, has
been to create, in spite of the efforts to suppress it, a vernacular
press which opened the gates of western culture to great masses of
people for whom it did not previously exist. The result has been a great
cultural awakening, a genuine renaissance, which has had profound
reverberations on the political and social life of Europe.

The literary revival of the folk speech in Europe has
invariably been a prelude to the revival of the national spirit
in subject peoples. The sentiment of nationality has its roots
in memories that attach to the common possessions of the
people, the land, the religion, and the language, but
particularly the language.

Bohemian patriots have a saying, "As long as the language
lives, the nation is not dead." In an address in 1904 Jorgen
Levland, who was afterward Premier of Norway, in a plea for
"freedom with self-government, home, land, and our own
language," made this statement: "Political freedom is not the
deepest and greatest. Greater is it for a nation to preserve
her intellectua