but a specifically German prose, standard for all, they were unable to create. To these two class-languages the rise of the city added a third, the language of the bourgeoisie, which is the true script-speech, reasoned and utilitarian, prose in the strictest sense of the word. It swings gently between the expression-modes of elegant society and of learning, in the one direction thinking for ever of new turns and words _à la mode_, in the other keeping sturdy hold on its existing stock of ideas. But in its inner essence it is of a _mercantile_ nature. It feels itself frankly as a class badge _vis-à-vis_ the historyless-changeless phrasing of the “people” which Luther and others employed, to the great scandal of their superficial contemporaries. With the final victory of the city the urban speech absorbs into itself that of elegance and that of learning. There arises in the upper strata of megalopolitan populations the uniform, keenly intelligent, practical κοινή, the child and symbol of its Civilization, equally averse from dialect and poetry--something perfectly mechanical, precise, cold, leaving as little as possible to gesture. These final homeless and rootless languages can be learned by every trader and porter--Hellenistic in Carthage and on the Oxus, Chinese in Java, English in Shanghai--and for their comprehension talk has no importance or meaning. And if we inquire what really created these languages, we find not the spirit of a race or of a religion, but the spirit of economics. CHAPTER VI CITIES AND PEOPLES (C) PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN I Now at last it is possible to approach--if with extreme precaution--the conception “people,” and to bring order into that chaos of people-forms that the historical research of the present day has only succeeded in making worse confounded than before. There is no word that has been used more freely and more utterly uncritically, yet none that calls for a stricter critique, than this. Very careful historians, even, after going to much trouble to clear their theoretical basis (up to a point) slide back thereafter into treating peoples, race-parts, and speech-communities as completely equivalent. If they find the name of a people, it counts without more ado as the designation of a language as well. If they discover an inscription of three words, they believe they have established a racial connexion. If a few “roots” correspond, the curtain rises at once on a primitive people with a primitive habitat in the background. And the modern nationalist spirit has only enhanced this “thinking in terms of peoples.”