pounds yearly. Among the unreproductive investments are—the employment
of foreign correspondence clerks, the time and money spent upon the
installation of educational plant for their production, the time and
money spent upon translations and interpreters for the proceedings
of international conferences and negotiations, the time devoted by
professors and other researchers (often nonlinguists in virtue of their
calling) to deciphering special treatises and learned periodicals in
languages not their own.[1]

[1]These are some of the actual visible losses owing to the
_presence_ of the language difficulty. No one can estimate the
value of the losses entailed by the _absence_ of free intercourse
due to removable linguistic barriers. Potential (but at present
non-realized) extension of goodwill, swifter progress, and wider
knowledge represent one side of their value; while consequent
non-realized increase in volume of actual business represents their
value in money. The negative statement of absence of results from
intercourse that never took place affords no measure of positive
results obtainable under a better system.

The tendency of those engaged in advancing material progress, which
consists in the subjection of nature to man's ends, is to adapt more and
more quickly their methods to changing conditions. Has the world yet
faced in a business-like spirit the problem of wiping out wastage on
words?

Big industrial concerns scrap machinery while it is yet perfectly
capable of running and turning out good work, in order to replace it by
newer machinery, capable of turning out more work in the same time. Time
is money. Can the busy world afford a language difficulty?