till very generally used for purposes of intercommunication
throughout Europe, while the difficulty experienced by all but Germans
and Russians in learning English is well known. Li Hung Chang is
reported to have said that, while for commercial reasons English is far
more widely used in China than French, the Chinese find French a much
easier language to learn to speak, and the preferences of the Chinese
may one day count for a good deal--in one direction or another--in the
world's progress. One frequently hears that the use of French for
international purposes is decaying; this is a delusion probably due to
the relatively slow growth of the French-speaking races and to various
temporary political causes. It is only necessary to look at the large
International Medical Congresses. Thus at one such Congress at Rome, at
which I was present, over six thousand members came from forty-two
countries of the globe, and over two thousand of them took part in the
proceedings. Four languages (Italian, French, German and English) were
used at this Congress. Going over the seven large volumes of
Transactions, I find that fifty-nine communications were presented in
English, one hundred and seventy-one in German, three hundred and one
in French, the rest in Italian. The proportion of English communications
to German is thus a little more than one to three, and the proportion of
English to French less than one to six. Moreover, the English-speaking
members invariably (I believe) used their own language, so that these
fifty-nine communications represent the whole contribution of the
English-speaking world. And they represent nothing more than that;
notwithstanding the enormous spread of English, of which we hear so
much, not a single non-English speaker seems to have used English. It
might be supposed that this preponderance of French was due to a
preponderance of the French element, but this was by no means the case;
the members of English-speaking race greatly exceeded those of
French-speaking race. But, while the English communications represented
the English-speaking countries only, and the German communications were
chiefly by German speakers, French was spoken not only by members
belonging to the smaller nations of Europe, from the north and from the
south, by the Russians, by most of the Turkish and Asiatic members, but
also by all the Mexicans and South Americans. These figures may not be
absolutely free from fallacy, due to tempor