A Great Future.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 449, 26 February 1890, Page 3

A Great Future.

One of the many signs of dawning light in the East and of growing unity among all nations is the rapid diffusion of the English language all over the world, says Daniel March in the ‘Congregationalism’ I spent five months in India travelling from Ceylon on the south to the utmost northern boundary of the great empire, and then passing eastward from Bombay to Calcutta, 1 left the country tor Burmah, with the full expectation that English will be the language of business and culture and education and public affairs, in India fifty years hence, and that in a hundred years multitudes of the common people will speak it as their mother tongue. Even now 5,000,000 of scholars are learning English at one time, and as many more millions are learning it in the intercourse of trade and sccial life. In five years another class, larger still,, will take the place of those now studying English in the schools. In any great city of India speak to any welldressed native in English, and the chances are that he will answer in the same tongue. I was riding in an oxbandy in the streets of Madura. My coolie driver had told him where to take me, but perhaps he did not know when told. I could not talk with him any more than I could talk with the ox he drove. I felt sure he was out of the way, but what could Ido ? I saw a man iu full native dress carrying an umbrella in one hand and a package of palm slips for writing in the other. He had the air of an educated man, and I took it for granted that he could speak English. I asked him if ho would kindly tell my coolie where to go. He replied, with an accent as good as my own, ‘ With the greatest pleasure.’ He trilled off a few words of musical Tamil, my coolie turned the head of his ox team the other way, and I was soon at the door of the house where I wished to go. At all leading hotels and business houses, stations on railways and ticket offices of railroads and steamboats, the English tongue is spoken, and in most cases it is well spoken, too. I never heard a native use a slang word, or any of the vulgarisms which we are so apt to hear in our every-day speech, and which to our great shame are sometimes admitted to our school books for children to read, and sometimes are recited and declaimed on platforms by professional readers and students of oratory. The educated natives of India have not yet learned to read our slang or dialect stories and poems. They do not see the wit or the wisdom of such writings when they hear them read by others, and it is to be hoped that thev never will.

In the public schools of Japan the English language is required to be taught by law. One needs no prophet’s vision to forsee that English will be the ruling language of the Island Empire in fifty years. The brightest and the most ambitious of the young men in the open ports and commercial cities of China are all eager to learn English as a passport to wealth, position and employment. The native preachers must needs learn English, or they will have no resources to fall back upon in their preparations for the pulpit. Constantinople has long been a Babel of tongues. Dr. Riggs, himself a learned linquist, told me that he had heard twenty dif erent languages spoken within a halfhour’s walk in that great cosmopolitan city. But among them all English is fast coming into use as the fittest to be a uniyersal medium of • communication on the great highway of nations between East and West.

A brother of the King of Siam, who is trying to establish a system of popular education in his own country, asked many questions about the organisation of common schools in America. He invited me to visit a large Government school kept within the inclosure of the royal palace for the sons of princes and nobles. I went as he desired, and the first class I found was reciting in English. A Siamese nobleman asked, half a dozen questions of the greatest difficulty about the books of Moses and the oldest records of the sacred Scriptures. In the course of the conversation he brought out a volume of Chambers’ Encyclopedia to verify a standard of dress ; he was ragged, and his hands did not look as if they had touched clean water for -many a day. But the strong spirit of inquiry which is going on in the whole world had touched his dull mind and quickened it into life. The Gospel of Luke in English was lying on the table. In the Syrian College at Constantinople, in the Syrian College at Beirut and the Batticotta College in Ceylon, in all the high schools and colleges in India, the students read, write, declaim, debate in English as they do in America.