In fact, the Review has all the appearance of an ordinary scientific
periodical, and the articles are as clearly expressed and as easy to
read as those in any similar review in a national language.

Even more convincing perhaps, for the uninitiated, is the evidence
afforded by the International Congresses of Esperantists. The first was
held at Boulogne in August 1905. It marked an epoch in the lives of
many of the participants, whose doubts as to the practical nature of an
artificial language there, for good and all, yielded to the logic of
facts; and it may well be that it will some day be rather an outstanding
landmark in the history of civilization. A brief description will,
therefore, not be out of place.

In the little seaport town on the north coast of France had come
together men and women of more than twenty different races. Some were
experts, some were beginners; but all save a very few must have been
alike in this, that they had learnt their Esperanto at home, and, as
far as oral use went, had only been able to speak it (if at all) with
members of their own national groups—that is, with compatriots who had
acquired the language under the same conditions as to pronunciation,
etc., as themselves. Experts and beginners, those who from practical
experience knew the great possibilities of the new tongue as a written
medium, no less than the neophytes and tentative experimenters who had
come to see whether the thing was worth taking seriously, they were now
to make the decisive trial—in the one case to test the faith that was
in them, in the other to set all doubt at rest in one sense or the other
for good and all.

The town theatre had been generously placed at the disposal of the
Congress, and the author of the language, Dr. Zamenhof, had left his