French above all, thus putting obstacles far more than we do in the way of the diffusion of that language. The Hungarians and Czechs, however, are limiting, on their side, the spread of German, and Italian officers are no longer required to know French for their competitive examinations. All these mutual jealousies are important factors in the problem; they give unwilling aid to the final predominance of English.

Probably the main obstacles in the way of this most desirable end come from ourselves. Two classes are specially to blame: our diplomats and our pedants. The former allow every opportunity to pass where the use of English might fairly be asserted-sometimes from mere stupidity in not estimating its importance, or from pride in the assertion of mere military or naval preponderance; sometimes (though rarely) from the vanity of airing their own proficiency in a foreign language; sometimes out of that insane folly which consists in humouring the sensibilities of jealous neighbours; from these causes, or from sheer indifference, there is no steady assertion of the English tongue in our colonial or foreign diplomacy. Of these reasons the policy of consideration for foreign sensibilities is not only the most utterly foolish, but the most ridiculous, for it makes concessions without the smallest chance of their motive being appreciated. To postulate delicate tact and tender sympathy for the feelings of others as the mainspring of any English surrender must seem perfectly grotesque to any foreign observer even when the facts are so. If, for example, Lord Cromer concedes that French (beside Arabic) shall be the official language of Egypt, is it likely that any Frenchman will attribute this most damaging concession to his suavity and sympathetic tact, and not to a fear of French threats? And yet, owing to this want of proper self-assertion in England, the noble American schools in Egypt, and all the other influences in the country that had wellnigh Anglicised it a few years ago, have been allowed to make way for the teaching of French, and the consequent spread of the influence of a local French press bitterly hostile to England, and spreading every sort of calumny against us among the natives. This blunder even reacts upon neighbouring nations. Is it likely that the Greeks, a most intelligent nation, would now be teaching their children French as their European language, if they had seen that English was becoming the leading speech of Alexandria, and thus of the Levant? They are indeed. shortsighted in not perceiving the steady and inevitable decay of French influence in Europe; in fifty years they will see it plainly enough. What I here complain of is that our politicians, who could by steady pressure accelerate the progress of English speaking in the world, only interfere to delay it. Have they ever conciliated one solitary foreigner by these ignorances or negligences?

The other great impediment to the rapid and certain spread of

English speaking and writing comes from the pedants, who find bad arguments to support the conservative spirit of the vulgar, and protest against any step which may remove the great difficulty in the way of foreigners learning English. Our grammar is very easy, our grammatical forms very few and simple; our spelling is the great obstacle. For a long time it has not represented our pronunciation with any approach to consistency or accuracy. Yet the pedants, as well as the public, insist upon maintaining our often irrational spelling as not only an essential of the language, but as the main test whether an Englishman is educated or not. It is, of course, the easiest test for slave-driven examiners to use in making artificial differences among their myriad candidates. Three or four mistakes in our absurd spelling will exclude from the army a young man who has every natural quality to be a good soldier. Even the few little timid changes made by American use, in the direction of omitting useless letters, are regarded with dislike, and accounted vulgarisms, by our purists. Truly, if they set before their minds, not the convenience of Civil Service examiners, not the stupid adherence to an irrational and artificial orthography, not the isolation of England, but the great future which her language might have in traversing the whole world, they could see that some concessions at all events might be made to the wants of all the foreign world, some release from the enormous tax of time upon our own children in having to spell contrary to their utterance.

Am I then a disciple of Mr. Pitman, and do I actually advocate the horrors of phonetic spelling? As a new system, no. A page of the Fonetic Nuz is to me as disgusting as to any purist in spelling. The advocates of that system have gone too fast and too far. They were, like the advocates of Volapük, too rash in offending popular prejudices, and they have met with their punishment. They did not realise that as language is not an invention but a growth, so spelling is a growth, and will not be reformed by a revolution, but by a quiet and rational pressure in a proper direction. If every literary man would do but a little in that way, even our generation would see a great change. But we must emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of printers as well as pedants. I found that it required some little persuasion to make the former print rime, rythm, sovran, and a few other such reforms, and I should certainly have reverted to the eighteenth-century tho', were it not that I could not face do' (dough). But these faint and insignificant beginnings should be followed up by many others, especially warning the reformers that they need not expect, or even aim at, uniformity in the earlier stages of the campaign. The real and only object for the present generation is to accustom the vulgar English public to a certain indulgence or laxity in spelling, so that gradually we may approach-I will not say a phonetic, but a reasonably consistent orthography. For then every 3 G

VOL. XL-No. 237

foreigner will find his task lightened; he will have some chance of learning English from books; any violations of use he commits by over-phonetic spelling will not be counted to him as a deadly crime against our language. And then in a short time, in spite of the jealousies that will arise, the British tongue, like British gold, will probably pervade the world.

The reader will give me credit, I hope, for opposing all wild and sudden expedients. The examples of Volapük and of phonetic spelling are sufficient warnings that any such policy only retards the great object which every promoter of Imperial British interests should have in view. But adopting as our motto Festina lente, I have yet one suggestion to offer which may probably, like all such suggestions, however moderate, be regarded at first with scorn, ultimately with interest and approval. It is based upon the historic parallel of what was done by the Greeks when they stood in face of a problem analogous to ours. There came a period, about the time that Rome absorbed and unified the kingdoms about the eastern Mediterranean, when Greek became the language of commerce, and even of polite intercourse, from the Tigris to the Atlantic Ocean, from the Red Sea to the British Channel. It was the interest of both Greeks and barbarians that many should learn to use Greek. How did the Greeks, a clever people, meet this demand? for their language was one of exceeding richness and complexity of forms, of literary dialects, of constructions. In the first place the varieties of spelling produced by writing the dialects were abolished. All the Greek intended for common intercourse was written in a common dialect, though, of course, great varieties of pronunciation must have remained. So far modern English is agreed with them. Though we may speak, we do not write, dialects in the books intended for business, for science, or for international use. The Greeks had this advantage over us, that their spelling of this common dialect was, if not phonetic, at least rational and consistent, except in one particular. But in this lay a great difficulty for foreigners. The Greek accent was not at all determined by the quantity of the vowels, and so a foreigner reading out a manuscript of the second century B.C. would make such mistakes as to render him unintelligible to Greek natives who heard him. That is not a matter of conjecture or probability; it may be tested by any one to-day in Greece. If an Oxford or Cambridge scholar carries his 'quantities' with him to the Peloponnesus, he will find himself hopelessly unintelligible, and he will hardly understand one word of what the people say, even when the words are good classical Greek.10

10 In the simplest words this curious difficulty occurs. For example 'H Tάplevos BIBAIov èxei, pronounced as our classical people barbarously pronounce it, has no meaning whatever to a Greek. To the correct H Taplévos Bißalov exe, he might answer Máλiora, but would not recognise our Mallora. For with him, as with us, quantity and accent are nearly identical.

English people do not, I believe, realise how completely useless it is to speak any language with wrong accent. Let us read out the following example quickly to ordinary hearers, and how many will understand it? 'He was misled up to his démise by mendacíous evidence and illusóry promíses. The interpréter intérposed so that the juror éscăpĕd uninjured.'

How, then, did the Greeks meet this difficulty, and help the Romans and Orientals who desired to learn their language? They put accents on their words, a perfect novelty, and very probably one which the purists of the day beheld with disgust." But by this means, and without altering their spelling, they gave a practical guide to foreigners and greatly facilitated the spread of Greek throughout the world. Why not adopt the same device as regards English? I have known many a British traveller puzzled in Ireland because he was ignorant of the accents on our proper names. Why not therefore write Drogheda, Athenrý, Achónry, Athý, &c., and save trouble? And then why not gradually and tentatively distinguish by accents though and tough, plágue and ágúe, according to any system which may be found most simple and convenient? A paragraph at the opening of the Grammar would be sufficient to explain it. Whether we should ever require the elaborate distinctions of the Greeks, whether a rude unscientific attempt might not be more effective than the systems of grammarians, these are questions which need not be discussed till some trial has been made.

Here, then, is the sum of the whole matter. The civilised world is undergoing a terrible waste of time and labour in the now compulsory acquiring of many languages, and in the main even this labour is thrown away, because most people do not advance far enough to use any foreign language. Moreover the great proportion of such students want foreign languages not to study their literature-a high and refined pursuit-but for practical purposes, in order to communicate with various natives, and in order to learn what they have to say on scientific or practical subjects. It is obvious that the use of one common language in addition to the mother tongue of each people would produce an enormous saving of time, and tend to the nearer and better knowledge of the world's progress among them all. This position of the common language was once attained by Greek, then in a wider sense by Latin, both of which commanded not only the business transactions, but even the literature of the world for some centuries. Since the abandonment of Latin in favour of the tongue of each European nation within its own area, confusion has prevailed, until the political predominance of France for a time imposed French as the language of diplomacy upon Europe, and more recently until the mercantile predominance of England and

"There is, moreover, clear evidence that this novelty was gradually introduced, and took some time to prevail.

America has imposed English as the language of commerce upon the trading routes of the world. Nevertheless the other civilised nations of Europe hold fast to their respective tongues as a matter of jealous patriotism, and have even broken down the primacy of French in the field of diplomacy. Moreover France is waning in population and in power, while the English-speaking races are waxing. The attempt to settle the problem by inventing an arbitrary tongue has been ineffectual, and will never succeed in the face of practical languages, which are the natural growth of the human mind, spoken and understood already by many millions of men. Nor will a common system of signs like the Chinese be of much avail in trade, where speaking is far more important even among the educated minority than writing, an art which the majority of the world has never yet acquired. In spite, therefore, of many serious obstacles, English will gain the victory and become the world-language. Some of these obstacles, such as the jealousy of neighbouring nations, we cannot obviate; others, which consist in certain anomalies affecting our orthography and hindering the quick acquisition of English by foreigners, we should endeavour to diminish by practical common sense, by disregarding the pedant and the purist, and by encouraging such gradual and moderate licenses as may make English easier, without violating the traditions or the spirit of our great heritage.