A POLYGLOT EMPIRE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1621, 16 August 1887, Page 3

A POLYGLOT EMPIRE.

The Queen’s dominions constitute preeminently a polyglot empire. Thera hae just been published in Russia a pocket glossary of a hundred languages—seventy of them spoken in the Russian Empire itself. That is nothing, however, to the number of languages which are the mother tongue of British subjects born and dwelling in British possessions. Every leading language of Europe (except Russian) is either the accepted speech of some part or other of Great Britain or extensively spoken by an element of the population. India alone, “ the land of a hundred tongues," is richer in distinct variations of Aryan than all Europe combined, while every living form of Semitic speech finds a habitation somewhere or other under the British flag. And when all this is said their remains the Babel of unclassified tongues, from the Etfic of West Africa to Chinook of British Columbia, spoken by the peoples and tribes and nations who live and thrive under the ®gis of England. This polyglot character of the empire is not a disintegrating quality, if what M. Rentn says in His profession of faith as regards things human is true. “We set (he says) above language, race, or geographical frontiers the consent of populations, whatever their tongue, race, or creed may be. What constitutes a nation is not the fact of speaking the same tongue or belonging to the same ethnographical group ; it is to have achieved great things in the past and and the desire to do more in the future." That strikes one as the enunciation of a true doctrine of Imperial federation.