1He continued: "To me it seems that Esperanto in vocabulary and grammar is a miracle of simplicity."
There are now (May 1907) seventy local Esperanto societies in Great Britain on the list of societies affiliated to the British Esperanto Association, and often several new ones are formed in a month. The first were Keighley and London, founded 1902. Seven more were formed in 1903; and since the beginning of 1906 no less than thirty-six. Besides the members of these there are a great many learners in classes and individual Esperantists who belong to no affiliated group. Every month one reads lists of lectures given in the most diverse places, very often with the note that a local club or class resulted, or that a large sale of Esperanto literature took place. Sometimes the immediate number of converts is surprising: e.g. on April 22, 1907, after a lecture on Esperanto at the Technical College, Darlington, seventy-eight students entered their names for a week's course of lessons to be held in the college three times a day.
There are now Esperanto consuls in the following towns: Bradford, Chester, Edinburgh, Harrogate, Hull, Hunslet, Keighley, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Oakworth, Plymouth, Rhos, Southampton, and St. Helens. Birmingham has within the last few months taken up the cause with its usual energy, and now has a large class.
In England the universities have been slow to show interest in Esperanto; but now that Cambridge has been selected as the seat of the Congress in 1907, the university is granting every facility, as also is the town council, in use of rooms and the like, and some professors and other members of the university are cordially co-operating. Last October Prof. Skeat, one of the fathers of English philology, took the chair at a preliminary meeting, and made a speech very favourable to Esperanto. He said, "I think Esperanto is a very good movement, and I hope it will succeed." The subject of Esperanto is being well put before the teachers of Cambridgeshire, and the railway companies all over the country and abroad are granting special
fares for the congress.1 It is probable that the overwhelming demonstration of the possibilities of this international language will open the eyes of many who have hitherto been indifferent, and that the movement will enter on a new phase of expansion in England, and through the example of England, which is closely watched abroad, in the world at large.
1It is a striking fact that six weeks before the opening of the congress 700 members have already secured their tickets.
IX
lessons to be drawn from the foregoing history
The extent to which more or less artificial languages are already used in various parts of the world for the transaction of interracial business, and the persistent preoccupation of thinkers with the idea for the last 200 years, culminating in the production of a great number of schemes in our own times, show that there is a demand for an international language, more perfect than has yet been available and universally valid. The list of languages proposed (see Part II., chap. ii.) by no means represents all that has been written and thought upon the subject. Many more have proposed solutions of the question, beginning with such men as Becher (1661), Kirchner (1665), Porele (1667), Upperdorf (1679), Müller (1681), Lobkowitz (1687), Besuier (1684), Solbrig (1725), Taboltzafo (1772), and continuing down to the present day. The striking success of Volapük and Esperanto in gaining, within a few years of publication, many thousands of ardent supporters has also been a revelation. It has proved most conclusively that there is a demand. If so many people in all lands have been willing to give up time and money to learning and promoting a language from which they could not expect to reap anything like full benefit for many years, what must be its value when ripened to yield full profits, i.e. when universally adopted?