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THE PROBLEM OF AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE

little more than one to three, and the proportion of English to French less than one to six. Moreover, the English-speaking members invariably (I believe) used their own language, so that these fifty-nine communications represent the whole contribution of the English-speaking world. And they represent nothing more than that; notwithstanding the enormous spread of English, of which we hear so much, not a single non-English speaker seems to have used English. It might be supposed that this preponderance of French was due to a preponderance of the French element, but this was by no means the case; the members of English-speaking race greatly exceeded those of French-speaking race. But, while the English communications represented the English-speaking countries only, and the German communications were chiefly by German speakers, French was spoken not only by members belonging to the smaller nations of Europe, from the north and from the south, by the Russians, by most of the Turkish and Asiatic members, but also by all the Mexicans and South Americans. These figures may not be absolutely free from fallacy, due to temporary causes of fluctuation. But that they are fairly exact is shown by the results of the following Congress, held at Moscow. If I take up the programme for the department of psychiatry and nervous disease, in which I was myself chiefly interested, I find that of 131 communications, 80 were in French, 37 in German and 14 in English. This shows that French, German and English bear almost exactly the same relation to one another as at Rome. In other words, 61 per cent of the speakers used French, 28 per cent German, and only 11 per cent English.

If we come down to one of the most recent International Medical Congresses, that of Lisbon in 1906, we find that the supremacy of French, far from weakening, is more emphatically affirmed. The language of the country in which the Congress was held was ruled out, and I find that of 666 contributions to the proceedings of the Congress,

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