The Bahá’í World
Volume 1 : 1925-1926
 ESPERANTO AND BAHÁ’Í TEACHINGS153
wings glisten in the sunlight, and move with equal strength and rhythm. The bird carries in its mouth a gem of great price—the gem of knowledge. I hear a voice say, “It is the bird of humanity which has been educated, trained and developed in the school of earth experience. Now that its two wings are equally strong, the equality of men and women is realized, and the bird of humanity, with a free spiritual consciousness, can soar from summit to summit of progress.”
ESPERANTO AND THE BAHÁ’Í TEACHINGS
By James F. Morton, Jr.
THE need of an international language has long been felt among the forward-looking men and women of all lands. Both ideal and utilitarian considerations urgently demand the establishment of such a language at the earliest possible moment. The practical handicaps in connection with all international intercourse and especially in all international congresses and similar gatherings, arising from lack of a common tongue, are becoming more manifest each year. The growth of the international spirit makes more glaring the lack of an efficient vehicle through which it may function.
It is obvious that national languages, no matter how widespread, will not serve the turn. The objection to them lies deeper than their complex structure, their abundant irregularities, their numerous idioms. Each of them embodies centuries of the separate history and experience of a race, with the past and present phases of racial psychology that have developed. Into each natural language the spirit of a people has been wrought. Its wonderful power of expressing the thoughts, sentiment and ideals that particularly distinguish its own group, is precisely the impassible barrier against its adequacy to meet the needs of other groups. A national bias is so deeply lodged in it as to be irremovable by any simplification or other scheme of adaptation. Hence it can never be made neutral, in such a way that all people shall feel equally at home in it. Moreover, the adoption of such a language, instead of allaying the causes of misunderstanding and ill will, would in some measure intensify them, since it would arouse the strongest jealousies and suspicions on the part of the greater nations whose tongues had been passed over for the favored one.
The international use, then, of any national language must in the nature of the case be a very limited one. It cannot be assumed that even the foremost men of all nations are skilled linguists, even when they are placed in a position where ability to comprehend one another perfectly would be of the utmost importance to themselves and to the world. No man can tell how serious has been the consequence of the lack of a common language in a single case. When the foremost representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan met at Versailles, to develop principles by which the peace of the world should be established and the course of all future history determined, it was found that there was not one language which all of them could understand; and the precision of the ideas expressed and discussed suffered accordingly with serious effects from which it is probable