International Language, Past, Present & Future / With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar

by Walter John Clark

XVI

the wider cosmopolitanism—the coming of asia

In the civilized West, where pleasure, business, and science are daily forging new ties of common interests between the nations, those engaged in such pursuits have clearly much to gain from the simplification of their pursuits by a common language. But let us look ahead a little further still. It may well be that the outstanding feature of the twentieth century in history will be the coming into line of the peoples of Asia with their pioneer brethren of the West. Look where you will, everywhere the symptoms are plain for those who can read them. Japan has led the way. China is following, and will not be far behind; eventually, as the Japanese themselves foresee, she will probably outstrip Japan, if

not the world. There seems to be no ground, ethnological or otherwise, for thinking that the lagging behind of Asia in modern civilization corresponds to a real inferiority of powers, mental or physical, in the individual Asiatic. Experience shows that under suitable conditions the Asiatic can efficiently handle all the white man's tools and weapons; the complete coming up to date is largely a matter of organization, education, and the possession of a few really able men at the head of affairs. Given these, progress may be astonishingly quick. Europeans do not yet seem to have grasped at all adequately the real significance of the last fifty years of Japanese history. Do they really think that the Chinaman is inferior to the Japanese? If so, let them ask any residents in the Far East. Can it be maintained that a generation ago the peasant of Eastern Europe was ahead of the country Chinaman? But the last few years have shown how swiftly modern civilization spreads, both in Europe and America, from the comparatively small group of nations which in the main have worked it out to the others, till lately considered backward and semi-barbarous. And this is the case not merely with the material products of civilization, the railway and the telegraph, but also as regards its divers manifestations in all that concerns the life of the people—constitutional government with growth of representative, elected authorities and democracy; universal education with universal power of reading and consequent birth of a cheap press; rise of industry and consequent growth of towns; universal military service

and discipline, now in force in most lands; rise of a moneyed and leisured class and consequent growth of sport, and of all kinds of clubs and societies for promoting various interests, social, sporting, political, religious, educational, philanthropic, and so forth. In fact, the more the material side of life is "modernized," the more closely do the citizens of all lands approximate to one another in their interests and activities, which ultimately rest upon and grow out of their material conditions. Meantime wealth and consequently foreign travel everywhere increase, fresh facilities of communication are constantly provided,

men from different countries are more and more thrown together, and all this makes for the further strengthening of mutual interests and the growth of fresh ones in common.

Now if (1) under the stress of "modernization" life is already becoming so similar in the lands of the West, and if (2) the Asiatic is not fundamentally inferior in mental and physical endowments, then it follows as a certainty that the Asiatic world will, under the same stress, enter the comity of nations, and approximate to the world-type of interest and activity. It is only a question of time. In economic history nothing is more certain than that science, organization, cheapness, and efficiency must ultimately prevail over sporadic, unorganized local effort based on tradition and not on scientific exploitation of natural advantages. Thus the East will adopt the material civilization of the West; and through the same organization of industrial and commercial life and generally similar economic conditions, the same type of moneyed class will grow up, with the same range of interests on the intellectual and social side, diverse indeed, but in their very diversity conforming more and more to the world-type.

Concurrently with this new tendency to uniformity proceeds the weakening of the two most powerful disintegrating influences of primitive humanity—religion and tradition. In the earlier stages of society these are the two most powerful agents for binding together into groups men already associated by the ties of locality and common ancestry, and fettering them in the cast-iron bonds of custom and ceremonial observance. While the members of each group are thus held together by the ideas which appeal most profoundly to unsophisticated mankind, the various groups are automatically and by the same process held apart by the full force of those ideas. Thus are produced castes, with their deadening opposition to all progress; and thus arise crusades, wars of religion and persecutions. Religion and tradition are then at once the mightiest integrants within each single community, and the mightiest disintegrants as between different communities.

But this narrow and dissevering spirit of caste dies back before

the spread of knowledge. The tendency to regard a man as unclean or a barbarian, simply because he does not believe or behave as one's own people, is merely a product of isolation and ignorance, and disappears with education and the general opening up of a country. The inquisitor can no longer boast of "strained relations"—strained physically on the rack, owing to differences of religious opinion. The state of things which made it possible for sepoys to revolt because rifle bullets were greased with the fat of a sacred animal, or for yellow men to tear up railway tracks because the magic desecrated the tombs of their ancestors, is rapidly passing away, as Orientals realize the profits to be made from scientific methods.