6. The primacy in commerce is freely conceded to our tongue. For such purposes it is spoken in all the great seaports of the world. In addition to this trade use, we may note that a great variety of practical inventions carry their English names and terms around the world.
7. We also have the great reading public of the world. Germans read; but their 45,000,000 do not consume more than one eighth as much literary food as England and America, the Canadas and Australia. The English literature market is not only the greatest in the world—exceeding in one year all the literary produce of antiquity which has come down to us—but it is a market which grows rapidly. If a German or a Frenchman wishes to reach the largest number of minds, he must write in the English language. We have made more than half the fame of German authors by translating their works into our tongue. Some of the German authors have been wise enough to learn and to use our speech in their books.
8. French and German each had a special advantage over English fifty years ago. Frenchmen have long had a rare power of popularizing knowledge—a power of which they have made much less use than would have been expected. French is very rich in the power of accurate and plain statement of scientific truth. This power Englishmen have been for some time borrowing, and the fruits of such copying appears in the good fame and liberal incomes of our Huxleys and Proctors. There is no reason to doubt that we shall overtake the French in this path of progress; for we have an inexhaustible demand for popularizations of science. Thirty years ago Germans had a primacy in research. They made the world come to their universities to study and master the German method in investigation. I believe that, though this German primacy still exists, it has nearly reached its end. English students have not gone in droves to Germany to come back empty handed. Many of them have conquered the German method and transferred it to their own home and tongue.
9. France is already out of the race. She has but thirty-seven millions, and grows only at a snail’s pace. A Frenchman has recently described the stationary condition of his people in the Révue des deux Mondes in stronger terms than I could use. German is our only serious rival for the primacy. Is it a serious rivalry? The Germans are a prolific race. They lose millions by emigration, and still increase to an extent which makes all Frenchmen sad. But how shall forty-five millions shut up in old Europe overtake the one hundred and ten millions who have the great open fields of the world? If North America were as thickly populated as Germany we should count our hosts as three or four hundred millions. They have room at home; but we have vastly more room. In a century our North American English population will number 250,000,000. The rest of the English speaking world can hardly fail to grow enough to make our grand total 400,000,000. The next doubling of our tribe—not more than one hundred and fifty years from now—would put us so far in front of all competition that no language would contest the primacy with us. Besides, we have great possibilities of gains outside of our own tribes. South America is more and more under the influence of English and American ideas; the East is being anglicised by the English dominion in India, and by American and English missionary schools. Africa is an open question; but a vast English speaking population on the Dark Continent is a far more probable addition to our numbers than this American-English population was in 1492, or even in 1700.
Such seems to be the outlook. In a recent letter forecasting the English-speaking primacy of the world, Mr. Gladstone said: “Mr. Barham Zincke, no incompetent calculator, reckons that the English-speaking peoples of the world one hundred years hence will probably count a thousand millions.… A century back I suppose they were not much, if at all, beyond fifteen millions.” This primacy, he adds, “would demand no propaganda, no superlative ingenuity or effort; it ought to be an orderly and natural growth.… To gain it will need no preterhuman strength; to miss it will require some portentous degeneracy.” I have made much more modest estimates than those quoted by Mr. Gladstone. I attach most importance to the political value of English and the nation-building instinct of our tribe. The great rush forward from fifteen to one hundred and ten millions in a century is a result of our political facility.
SUNDAY READINGS.
SELECTED BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.