(3) The proposition that it is economically sounder to carry on
international intercourse in one easy language than in a large number of
hard ones rests upon the principle that it does not pay to do a thing a
hard way, if the same results can be produced by an easy way.

The whole industrial revolution brought about by the invention of
machinery depended upon this principle. Since an artificial language,
like machinery, is a means invented by man of furthering his ends, there
seems to be no abuse of analogy in comparing them.

When it was found that machinery would turn out a hundred pieces of
cloth while the hand-loom turned out one, the hand-loom was doomed,
except in so far as it may serve other ends, antiquarian, aesthetic, or
artistic, which are not equally well served by machinery. Similarly,
to take another revolution which is going on in our own day through
a further application of machinery, when it is found that corn can
be reaped and threshed by machinery, that hay can be cut, made,
carried, and stacked by machinery, that man can travel the high road
by machinery, sooner or later machinery is bound to get the bulk of
the job, because it produces the same results at greater speed and
less cost. So, in the field of international intercourse, if an easy
artificial language can with equal efficiency and at less cost produce
the same results as a multiplicity of natural ones, in many lines
of human activity, and making all reserves in matters antiquarian,
aesthetic, and artistic, sooner or later the multiplicity will have to
go to the scrap-heap[1] as cumbrous and out of date. It may be a hundred
years; it may be fifty; it may be even twenty. Almost certainly the
irresistible trend of economic pressure will work its will and insist
that what has to be done shall be done in the most economical way.