Need of an Auxiliary Language To-day--Volapuek--The Claims of
Spanish--Latin--The Claims of English--Its Disadvantages--The
Claims of French--Its Disadvantages--The Modern Growth of National
Feeling opposed to Selection of a Natural Language--Advantages of
an Artificial Language--Demands it must fulfil--Esperanto--Its
Threatened Disruption--The International Association for the
adoption of an Auxiliary International Language--The First Step to
Take.

Ever since the decay of Latin as the universal language of educated
people, there have been attempts to replace it by some other medium of
international communication. That decay was inevitable; it was the
outward manifestation of a movement of individualism which developed
national languages and national literatures, and burst through the
restraining envelope of an authoritarian system expounded in an official
language. This individualism has had the freest play, and we are not
likely to lose all that it has given us. Yet as soon as it was achieved
the more distinguished spirits in every country began to feel the need
of counterbalancing it. The history of the movement may be said to begin
with Descartes, who in 1629 wrote to his friend Mersenne that it would
be possible to construct an artificial language which could be used as
an international medium of communication. Leibnitz, though he had solved
the question for himself, writing some of his works in Latin and others
in French, was yet all his life more or less occupied with the question
of a universal language. Other men of the highest distinction--Pascal,
Condillac, Voltaire, Diderot, Ampere, Jacob Grimm--have sought or
desired a solution to this problem.[236] None of these great men, however,
succeeded even in beginning an attempt to solve the problem they were
concerned with.

Some forty years ago, however, the difficulty began again to be felt,
this time much more keenly and more widely than before. The spread of
commerce, the facility of travel, the ramifications of the postal
service, the development of new nationalities and new literatures, have
laid upon civilized peoples a sense of burden and restriction which
could never have been felt by their forefathers in the previous century.
Added to this, a new sense of solidarity had been growing up in the
world; the financial and commercial solidarity, by which any disaster or
disturbance in one country causes a wave of d