children and be mutually comprehensible. Commerce at present is
doing more than the philosophers to that end. While the countrymen
of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Max Müller persist in burying their
laboriously heaped treasures under a load of black-letter type and
words and sentences the most fearfully and wonderfully made, the
skipper scatters English words with English calico and American clocks
among all the isles. A picturesque fringe of pigeon English decorates
the coasts of Africa, Asia and Oceanica. It might be deeper, and
doubtless will be, for our mother-tongue will very certainly be
supreme in the world of trade for at least a couple of centuries to
come. If we were only half as sure of its being adopted by France as
by Fiji!

If almighty steam and sail must remain unequal to this task, wondrous
indeed are their other potencies. They have contracted the globe like
a dried apple, only in a far greater degree. In 1776 three years
was the usual allotment of the grand tour. Beginning at London, it
extended to Naples and occasionally Madrid. It often left out Vienna,
and more frequently Berlin. In the same period you may now put a
girdle round the earth ninefold thick. You may, given the means
and the faculties, set up business establishments at San Francisco,
Yokohama, Shanghai, Canton, Calcutta, Bombay, Alexandria, Rome, Paris,
London and New York, and visit each once a quarter. The goods to
supply them may travel, however bulky, on the same ship and nearly the
same train in point of speed with yourself. Nowhere farther than a few
weeks from home in person, nowhere are you more remote verbally than a
few hours. The Red Sea opens to your footsteps, as it did to those of
Moses; and the lightning that bears your words cleaves the pathway of
Alexander and the New World for which he wept.