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common tongue. In fact, wherever civilization has made an advance, the action of the great causes of change in language has received a check. Every conquest over a horde of barbarians, every attempt to found a settled government, to establish a code of laws, to systematize a religion, or to originate a literature, is a step forward in the direction of linguistic unity. The practical aim of the science of language is the formation of a universal speech, and the time may yet come when the dream will be converted into a reality. The inventions of the present century —the steamer, the railway, and the telegraph — are bringing all parts of the world into a closer connection with one another, and abolishing the barriers created by differences of speech. Commerce demands a lingua franca, and now that commerce is world-wide its lingua franca must be world-wide also.

The language of the chief trading nations must finally prevail in the struggle for existence, and the prophecy has already been hazarded that pigeon-English, or a similar grammarless jargon, will be the future medium of universal intercourse. However this may be, the endeavour to revive the perishing languages of Europe, and to make the limits of speech the limits of nationality, is a reversal of the lesson of history and a return to primitive barbarism. It is but the transient reaction against the Empire of the first Napoleon, based on the false belief that language and race are convertible terms. But the endeavour, however flattering to nations without a history, is doomed to failure. Little by little the weaker languages and dialects of Europe are disappearing before the schoolmaster and the railway, and artificial nurture