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Latin, he now declares himself strongly against any artificial language,* and advocates the use of English, French, and German. This is a modified form of the old Max Miiller proposal, that all serious scientific work should be published in one of six lan- guages. It does not seem a very convincing attitude to take up, because it ignores the facts: (1) that the actual trend of the world is the other way—towards inclusion of fresh national languages among the Kultursprachen, not towards accentuation of the predominance of these three; (2) that the increase of specialization and new studies at universities is leaving less and less time for mastering several difficult languages merely as means to other branches of study. Why should everybody have to learn English, French, and German?

For the rest, Esperanto is now beginning to take hold in Germany. The Germans have, as a general rule, open minds for this kind of problem, and are trained to take objective views in linguistic matters on the scientific merits of the case. The reason why they have been somewhat backward hitherto in the Esperanto movement is no doubt their disappointment at the failure of Volapük, which they had done much to promote. But now that, in spite of this special drawback, the first steps have been made, and clubs and papers are beginning to spring up again, everything points to powerful co-operation from Germany in the future.

In Switzerland progress has been enormous since the Geneva Congress of 1906. Many clubs and classes are already formed or in process of formation, and university men are supporting the movement. In one respect the Swiss are now in the van of the Esperantist world: they have just started a newspaper, Esperanto, the prospectus of which declares that it will no longer treat the language as an end in itself, or make propaganda; it will run on the lines of an ordinary weekly, merely using

• Herr Diels quaintly finds that Esperanto has only one gender — the

feminine! Surely an ultra-Shavian obsession of femininity, It is perhaps some distinction to out-Shaw Bernard Shaw in any line.