One of the Nazi sneers at the beginning of she radio propaganda war was the allegation hat the English are so characteristically and intellectually deficient in the language sense hat foreigners had to be employed by the B.B.C. in order to embark on a multilingual information service. The Nazis then proceeded to destroy their own argument by employing Norman Biaillie-Stewart, the ex-Guards officer convicted as a spy, as one of their principal speakers on the English programme. These statements have been in common usage for years, some sort of exclusive privilege having long been assumed by other peoples for fluency in languages in spite of the great part played by English scholars in linguistic fields abroad Accepted in its broadest sense, the Nazi standard of perfection must have been shocked when Mr, Edward Burgin, British Minister of Supply, entertaining members of the Foreign Press Association to luncheon in London, addressed them in English, his mother tongue, and then switched off successively to French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian—no mean linguistic accomplishment. The fact is that far too long have such false statements been permitted to circulate without refutation. Most of the peoples of the world must use h as the lingua franco because of the inter-relations dependent on the economic, political, and cultural influence of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, but that does not imply a total ignorance or incapacity on the part of the native English-speaking peoples to speak other languages.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.