ary causes of fluctuation.
But that they are fairly exact is shown by the results of the following
Congress, held at Moscow. If I take up the programme for the department
of psychiatry and nervous disease, in which I was myself chiefly
interested, I find that of 131 communications, 80 were in French, 37 in
German and 14 in English. This shows that French, German and English
bear almost exactly the same relation to one another as at Rome. In
other words, 61 per cent of the speakers used French, 28 per cent
German, and only 11 per cent English.

If we come down to one of the most recent International Medical
Congresses, that of Lisbon in 1906, we find that the supremacy of
French, far from weakening, is more emphatically affirmed. The language
of the country in which the Congress was held was ruled out, and I find
that of 666 contributions to the proceedings of the Congress, over 84
per cent were in French, scarcely more than 8 per cent in English, and
less than 7 per cent in German. At the subsequent Congress at Budapesth
in 1909, the French contributions were to the English as three to one.
Similar results are shown by other International Congresses. Thus at the
third International Congress of Psychology, held at Munich, there were
four official languages, and on grounds of locality the majority of
communications were in German; French followed with 29, Italian with 12,
and English brought up the rear with 11. Dr. Westermarck, who is the
stock example of the spread of English for international purposes, spoke
in German. It is clearly futile to point to figures showing the prolific
qualities of English races; the moral quality of a race and its language
counts, as well as mere physical capacity for breeding, and the moral
influence of French to-day is immensely greater than that of English.
That is, indeed, scarcely a fair statement of the matter in view of the
typical cases just quoted; one should rather say that, as a means of
spoken international communication for other than commercial purposes,
English is nowhere.

There is one other point which serves to give prestige to French: its
literary supremacy in the modern world. While some would claim for the
English the supreme poetic literature, there can be no doubt that the
French own the supreme prose literature of modern Europe. It was felt by
those who advocated the adoption of English or French that it would
surely be a gain for human progress if the auxiliary int