The apostle of a universal language is made to feel pretty plainly that he is regarded as a crank. He may console himself with the usual defence that a crank is that which makes revolutions; but for all that, it is chilling to be met with a certain smile.
Let us analyse that smile. It varies in intensity, ranging from the scathing sneer damnatory to the gentle dimple deprecatory. But in any case it belongs to the category of the smile that won't come off. I know that grin—it comes from Cheshire.
What, then, do we mean when we smile at a crank? Firstly and generally that we think his ideal impracticable. But it has been shown that an international language is not impracticable. This alone ought to go far towards removing it from the list of cranks' hobbies.
Secondly, we often mean that the ideal in question is opposed to common sense—e.g. when we smile at a man who lives on protein biscuits or walks about without a hat. We do not impugn the feasibility of his diet or apparel, but we think he
is going out of his way to be peculiar without reaping adequate advantage by his departure from customary usage.
The test of "crankiness," then, lies in the adequacy of the advantage reaped. A man who learns and uses Esperanto may at present depart as widely from ordinary usage as a patron of Eustace Miles's restaurant or a member of the hatless brigade; but is it true that the advantage thereby accruing is equally disputable or matter of opinion? Is it not, on the contrary, fairly certain that the use of an auxiliary language, if universal, would open up for many regions from which exclusion is now felt as a hindrance?
Take the case of a doctor, scientist, scholar, researcher in any branch of knowledge, who desires to keep abreast of the advance of knowledge in his particular line. He may have to wait for years before a translation of some work he wishes to read is published in a tongue he knows, and in any case all the periodical literature of every nation, except the one or two whose languages he may learn, will be closed to him. The output of learned work is increasing very fast in all civilized countries, and therefore results are recorded in an increasing number of languages in monographs, reports, transactions, and the specialist press. A move is being made in the right direction by the proposal to print the publications of the Brussels International Bibliographical Institute in Esperanto.
Take a few examples of the hampering effect upon scholarly work of the language difficulty as it already exists. The diffusion of learning will, ironically enough, increase the difficulty.1 The late Prof. Todhunter, of Cambridge, was driven to learning Russian for mathematical purposes. He managed to learn enough to enable him to read mathematical treatises; but how many mathematicians or scientists (or classical scholars, for that matter) could do as much? And of how much profit was the learning of Russian, quâ Russian, to Prof. Todhunter? It only took up time which could have been better spent, as there cannot be anything very uplifting or cultivating in the language of mathematical Russian.
1By multiplying the languages used.