The whole industrial revolution brought about by the invention of machinery depended upon this principle. Since an artificial language, like machinery, is a means invented by man of furthering his ends, there seems to be no abuse of analogy in comparing them.
When it was found that machinery would turn out a hundred pieces of cloth while the hand-loom turned out one, the hand-loom was doomed, except in so far as it may serve other ends, antiquarian, aesthetic, or artistic, which are not equally well served by machinery. Similarly, to take another revolution which is going on in our own day through a further application of machinery, when it is found that corn can be reaped and threshed by machinery, that hay can be cut, made, carried, and stacked by machinery, that man can travel the high road by machinery, sooner or later machinery is bound to get the bulk of the job, because it produces the same results at greater speed and less cost. So, in the field of international intercourse, if an easy artificial language can with equal efficiency and at less cost produce the same results as a multiplicity of natural ones, in many lines of human activity, and making all reserves in matters antiquarian, aesthetic, and
artistic, sooner or later the multiplicity will have to go to the scrap-heap1 as cumbrous and out of date. It may be a hundred years; it may be fifty; it may be even twenty. Almost certainly the irresistible trend of economic pressure will work its will and insist that what has to be done shall be done in the most economical way.
1But only, of course, in those lines in which an international auxiliary language can produce equally good results. This excludes home use, national literature, philology, scholarly study of national languages, etc.
So much, then, for the question of principle. In treating it, certain large assumptions have been made; e.g. it is said above, "if an easy artificial language can with equal efficiency ... produce the same results," etc. Here it is assumed that the artificial language is (1) easy, and (2) that it is possible for it to produce the same results. Again, however easy and possible, its introduction might cost more than it saved. These are questions of fact, and are treated in the three following chapters under the heading of "The Question of Practice."
III
the question of practice—an international language is possible
The man who says a thing is impossible without troubling to find out whether it has been done is merely "talking through his hat," to use an Americanism, and we need not waste much time on him. Any one, who maintains that it is impossible to transact the ordinary business of life and write lucid treatises on scientific and other subjects in an artificial language, is simply in the position of the French engineer, who gave a full scientific demonstration of the fact that an engine could not possibly travel by steam.
The plain fact is that not only one artificial language, but
several, already exist, which not only can express, but already have expressed all the ideas current in social intercourse, business, and serious exposition. It is only necessary to state the facts briefly.