In my opinion two lessons of 45 minutes a week would amply suffice to secure practical results never dreamed of in the French, German, or Spanish classes.  After a very short course of study, the boys and girls would get an opportunity to correspond with scholars of their own age and station in many lands.  There are even now hundreds of school boys and girls in France, Germany, Austria, Spain, and even in China and Japan eager for such interchange of thoughts by means of Esperanto.

The hour or hour and a half spent weekly on this subject would be amply repaid by the increased intelligence and linguistic feeling of the pupils, and ultimately the subject could be taught with great benefit to the whole school, doing away with the necessity of ineffectual attempts at teaching foreign languages to all and sundry, regardless of taste and capacity.

(6) Perhaps a few remarks may be in place here to substantiate still more clearly the postulate that Esperanto fulfills absolutely the ideal requirement of a language that means to be introduced throughout the world as a secondary or auxiliary language:  Facility of acquirement to all nations.

(a) There is not one difficult sound, such as our th, our obscure vowels, the French nasals, the German ae, oe, ue, etc.  The vowels are a, e, i, o, and u.  Each has but one sound value, and that long and full, approximately as in the phrase:  “Pa may we go, too?”

(b) The tonic accent, an insuperable difficulty in English, on account of its irregularity and elusiveness, is in Esperanto invariably on the last vowel but one.

(c) The grammar is reduced to a minimum, the whole mechanism of Esperanto being compassed within 16 rules which any one can grasp and assimilate inside one hour.

(d) The vocabulary is extremely small, less than 1,000 roots, mostly common to every Aryan tongue, being sufficient for all ordinary purposes of language.

This is due to the marvelously ingenious system of word building, which enables anyone to derive from a dozen to one hundred and more words from every root, there being to this derivation no limit but that of common sense.

Of course, the vocabulary for science and technology is considerably larger, but equally flexible.

(e) There are no troublesome genders; sex is expressed by the insertion of “in” before the “o” ending of nouns, and of course only in the case of animate creation.  For instance, “viro” is man, “virino” woman, “frato” brother, “fratino” sister, “kuzo” male cousin, “kuzino” female cousin, etc.  And here Esperanto has over all other languages not only the signal advantage that there are no irregularities, but the far more important advantage that the scheme is applicable to all cases.  For instance, although we have in English from 30 to 40 different ways of forming the feminine such as father, mother; brother, sister; uncle, aunt; bull, cow; stallion, mare; fox, vixen; etc., yet in most cases we possess no decent or sensible way to indicate the sex of the individuals; as, for instance, in the cases of teacher, doctor, friend, cousin, neighbor, witness, elephant, camel, goat, typist, stenographer, companion, president, chairman, etc.