But there is one thing to which the attention of young Americans should be directed as influencing their college life.  Our country is no longer isolated.  We can no longer be called a provincial people.  We are decidedly a very intimate part of the world.  Our relations with other peoples grow closer and closer, and they will keep on growing closer as the years pass by.  A thousand Americans travel over sea to-day where one went abroad fifty years ago.  Our foreign commerce is now greater in a single year than it used to be in an entire decade—­yes, and quite recently, too, so swift our increase.

Other countries are several times nearer to us than they were even in the last generation.  It took Emerson almost a month to cross the Atlantic.  Now you go over in a week.  You can send a cablegram to any country in the world and have it delivered, translated into the language of the person to whom it is sent, a great deal quicker than the dawn can travel.  Invention has made snail-like the speed of light.

What does all this mean?  It means that in our relations we have become cosmopolitan.  Therefore we Americans ought to know other languages than our own.  Charles Sumner said that if he had to go through college again he would study nothing but modern languages and history.  Of course I do not presume to advise you who are reading this paper to do that, although it is precisely what I should do if I were going through college again.  But I do advise you to do this:  Acquire at least two languages in addition to your own—­French and German.

Indeed, you ought to have three languages besides your own—­French, German, and Spanish.  For, consider!  Here is Mexico, our next-door neighbor—­its people speak Spanish; Cuba, a kind of national ward of ours—­its people speak Spanish.  The people of our possessions in the Pacific speak Spanish; of Porto Rico, Spanish; of the Central and South American “Republics”—­with all of whom we are destined, in spite of ourselves, to have relations of ever-increasing intimacy—­all speak Spanish.

And French?  You can travel all over Europe intelligently if you speak French.  And German—­the language that is going to make a good race with English itself as the commercial language of the world is German.  For example, you can go all through commercial Russia without a guide if you speak German.  You can get along in any port of the Orient if you speak German.  So you can if you speak English, it is true.  And think of how many millions of excellent people in our own country are still German-speaking (although our German citizens are so splendidly patriotic that they acquire English just as soon as they possibly can).

But the point is, that your usefulness in every direction will be increased by a knowledge of the languages.  The other things that you study in college you will largely forget, anyhow; and, besides, you study them principally for the mental discipline in them.  But if you get a language, and get it correctly, thoroughly, you can find enough use for it to keep brushed up on it.  And of course you can read it all the time, whether you have a chance to talk it or not.