THE CONFLICT OF LANGUAGES
tion for all Asia south and east of the Himalayas, will have to develop of their own force or dwindle and pass away. They may quite probably pass away. There is no sign that either the English or the Americans have a sufficient sense of the importance of linguistic predominance in the future of their race to interfere with natural processes in this matter for many years to come.
Among peoples not actually subject to British or American rule, and who are neither waiters nor commercial travellers, the inducements to learn English rather than French or German, do not increase. If our initial assumptions are right, the decisive factor in this matter is the amount of science and thought the acquisition of a language will afford the man who learns it. It becomes, therefore, a fact of very great significance that the actual number of books published in English is less than that in French or German, and that the proportion of serious books is conspicuously less. A large proportion of English books are novels adapted to the minds of women or of boys and superannuated business men, stories designed rather to allay than stimulate thought—they are the only books, indeed, that are profitable to publisher and author alike. The present conditions of book production for the English reading public offer no hope of any immediate change in this respect. There is neither honour nor reward—there is not even food or shelter—for the American or Englishman who devotes a year or so of his life to the adequate treatment of any spacious question, and so small is the English reading public with any
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