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would be too great if by it we could obtain a universal tongue. It is, therefore, imperative that the slightest effort in that direction should be attended to. The best years of my life have been devoted to this momentous cause.
I shall not here enter upon an analysis of the various attempts already made to give the public a universal language, but will content myself with remarking that these efforts have amounted either to a short system of mutually-intelligible signs, or to a natural simplification of the grammar of existing modern languages, with a change of their words into others arbitrarily formed. The attempts of the first category were quickly seen to be too complicated for practical use, and so faded into oblivion; those of the second were, perhaps, entitled to the name of "languages," but certainly not "international" languages. The inventors called their tongues "universal," I know not why, possibly because no one in the whole world, except themselves, could understand a single word written or spoken in any of them. If a language, in order to become universal, has but to be named so, then, forsooth, the wish of any single individual can frame out of any existing dialect a universal tongue. As these authors naively imagined that their essays would be enthusiastically welcomed and taken up by the whole world, and as this unanimous welcome is precisely what the cold and indifferent world declines to give, when there is no chance of realising any immediate benefit, it is not much to be marvelled at if these brilliant attempts came to nothing. The greater part of the world was not in the slightest degree interested in the prospect of a new language, and the persons who really cared about the matter thought it scarcely worth while to learn a tongue which none but the inventor could understand. When the whole world, said they, has learnt
