The first and most ludicrous of them is the stubbornness with which each fragment of the race prides itself on having a language of its own. This confusion of tongues has irritated and inconvenienced and helped to exasperate against each other the various sections of the human community for thousands of years, although we could suppress it at will in half a generation. Millions of us have an acute and constant experience of the absurdity of the system. In our schools, where mind and body require the fullest possible attention during the few years of training, we devote a large proportion of the time to teaching children how the same idea may be expressed by half a dozen different sounds. The higher the class of school, the more valuable and skilled the teacher, the more time must be wasted in learning how ancient Greeks and Romans, or how Germans and French and Italians, have invented different sounds from ours for expressing the same ideas. The slenderness of the protest one hears against this polyglot system from educators themselves is amazing. They have, it is true, begun to rebel in large numbers against the teaching of dead languages, but comparatively few of them support the increasing demand for that adoption of a common tongue which would do so much for the advance of education.
Those whose parents did not happen to be wealthy enough in their youth to send them to schools which have the distinction of teaching "languages" are hampered in a hundred ways. If they travel, they must pay sycophantic waiters and couriers to give them a dim understanding of the human world through which they pass. Even in their own country they cannot order a dinner at any well-ordered restaurant without first studying a lengthy vocabulary of superfluous sounds, or without practising a dozen little hypocrisies to conceal their ignorance. In large colonial hotels, where hardly a single person who does not speak English is ever found, one receives a "menu" with the usual intimidating array of French phrases. "You ought to supply dictionaries with this sort of thing!" said an angry young squatter, taking a seat beside me in the Grand Hotel at Melbourne, to the waiter. If you are travelling for business, or even transacting business at home, you must have your foreign correspondents and agents; and with their aid you follow dimly the very interesting advances and experiments that are being made in your department abroad. Our Governments must pay more heavily for diplomatic and consular service. Our books and magazines make a parade of foreign phrases which have not yet become as familiar as English. Our shopkeepers add twenty-five per cent. to the cost of our linen by calling it "lingerie." ...