gated in England and was longest adhered to in Germany, in which country university lectures were delivered in Latin by a few professors within the memory of the present generation. To some extent French was for a long time the most generally spoken language. Professor Fouillée, in his "Psychology of the French People," asserts that toward the end of the seventeenth century France had twenty millions of inhabitants; Great Britain and Ireland, about nine millions; Germany, nineteen millions; Austria, somewhat less than thirteen millions, and that among the fifty million inhabitants of Europe France comprised about forty per cent.[1] Besides, if a person spoke two languages, one of them was almost invariably French. In 1789, according to the same authority, France had a population of twenty-six millions; Great Britain and Ireland, of twelve millions; Russia, of twenty-five millions; Germany, of twenty-eight millions, and Austria, of about eighteen millions. France now represented only twenty-seven per cent, of the inhabitants of Europe, Russia having meanwhile taken its place among the great powers. France continued to decline until the close of the nineteenth century, when it included only about eleven per cent, of the population of Europe. Nobody knows how many persons speak Russian in the proper sense of the word, but probably a good deal fewer than one half of the citizens of the empire.
Let us now glance at the career of the Castilian tongue. At the death of Philip the Second the population of Spain is estimated to have been about eight and a half millions. Towards the close of the seventeenth century it is supposed to have sunk to about six millions, since many villages were deserted and long stretches of country lay uncultivated. Within the next eight or ten decades there was considerable improvement, so that by the beginning of the nineteenth century the population is believed to have doubled. The number of inhabitants in the Spanish American states is estimated at about thirty-six millions. Outside of these countries, and including Cuba but excluding the mother-country, there may be one or two millions of Spanish-speaking people; this makes the entire number between thirty-eight and forty millions. But so badly managed are the internal affairs of the Central American states that the best possible "guess" at the number of their inhabitants may be wide of the mark. Of this total population not one tenth, more likely not one twentieth, has received systematic instruction in any language or in anything else. Besides, the number of persons of pure Spanish descent outside of the mother-country is comparatively small. As it is reputed to be but nineteen per cent, in Mexico, the total number of Spaniards at the present day may fall far short of the above estimate: that is to say, if we credit Spain with eighteen millions
- ↑ Page 321. It will be noticed that if the figures are correct the per cent. can not be.
