Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 July 1885 — Two Centuries Hence. [ARTICLE]

Two Centuries Hence.

Max Muller estimates that two centuries hence the English language will be spoken by about 1,837,000,000 people, against about 790,000,000 of folks who will use the German, Spanish, French, and Italian. He rates the use of German then at little more than one-twelfth that of the English. The total of all the languages nam§d will be nearly equal to the world’s population at that time. If his forecast should become history it would involve the practical extinction of all the thousands of other languages that are now spoken, except that of the few which would survive as literary curiosities or be embalmed in the memory of the student of philology. What an immense amount of time will be saved by such an elimination of the practically valuable from that which will then be disregarded as useless.

It is difficult even to speculate intelligently on the character of the revolution which such a change will involve. Of course, any one can reason out the facts that the publication of the Bible in several scores of different languages will then be unnecessary, and that the ordinarily-educated man of that time will understand all the languages that are spoken. But who can say that the Vast fund of information embodied in those few tongues will not be a much harder task than is the sum of human knowledge of to-day? The man who now considers it his duty to himself and fellows to keep moderately well abreast of current literature and marks how rapidly its volume increases might' well stand aghast at the idea of being charged with such a responsibility two centuries hence, though the number of languages may then be counted on the fingers of one hand. It is not only the accretion bf fresh knowledge clustering around already existing departments of literature, science, and art, but the rapidly increasing number of those departments that is calculated to appall. Probably we should be justified in asserting that no one will essay the task of even looking askance at aU that is regarded as knowable two centuries hence. It rather-seems likely that the sum of knowledge wiU be so divided up into separate parcels as to sunder the possessors quite as widely as they noyr are by the inability to understand the commonest words in the language used by another. The human family may then be perforce sundered into castes each of which has its own molds of thought and expression to which the rest are utter strangers. It woqld be indeed wonderful, as judged by the light of the present day, if the result of all this progress which now seems to tend towards unification should be a redividing up of the world into clans and guilds, each of which regards the others as entities of existence whose rights it is not bound to respect. —Chicago Tribune.