These things count for French as against English now, and they will count for infinitely more in the coming years. And over German also French has many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance of books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as popular English and American romance. And German compared with French is an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to sacrifice. There has been in Germany a more powerful parallel to what one may call the "honest Saxon" movement among the English, that queer mental twist that moves men to call an otherwise undistinguished preface a "Foreword," and find a pleasurable advantage over their fellow-creatures in a familiarity with "eftsoons." This tendency in German has done much to arrest the simplification of idiom, and checked the development of new words of classical origin. In particular it has stood in the way of the international use of scientific terms. The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian have a certain community of technical, scientific, and philosophical phraseology, and it is frequently easier for an Englishman with some special knowledge of his subject to read and appreciate a subtle and technical work in French, than it is for him to fully enter into the popular matter of the same tongue. Moreover, the technicalities of these peoples, being not so immediately and constantly brought into contrast and contact with their Latin or Greek roots as they would be if they were derived (as are so many "patriotic" German technicalities) from native roots, are free to qualify and develop a final meaning distinct from their original intention. In the growing and changing body of science this counts for much. The indigenous German technicality remains clumsy and compromised by its everyday relations, to the end of time it drags a lengthening chain of unsuitable associations. And the shade of meaning, the limited qualification, that a Frenchman or Englishman can attain with a mere twist of the sentence, the German must either abandon or laboriously overstate with some colossal wormcast of parenthesis.... Moreover, against the German tongue there are hostile frontiers, there are hostile people who fear German preponderance, and who have set their hearts against its use. In Roumania, and among the Slav, Bohemian, and Hungarian peoples, French attacks German in the flank, and has as clear a prospect of predominance.