suggestion that "if we write more correctly, let it be to express especially honest feelings and just thoughts."

Feelings may be honest though they are violent, but irritation is not the best frame of mind for just thinking. The tenacity with which some of the newspapers of London are wont to defend the accepted British orthography is perhaps due rather to feeling than to thought. Lowell told us that esthetic hatred burned nowadays with as fierce a flame as ever once theological hatred; and any American who chances to note the force and the fervor and the frequency of the objurgations against "American spelling" in the columns of the Saturday Review, for example, and of the Athenæum, may find himself wondering as to the date of the papal bull which declared the infallibility of contemporary British orthography, and as to the place where the council of the Church was held at which it was made an article of faith.

The Saturday Review and the Athenæum, highly pitched as their voices are, yet are scarcely shriller in their cry to arms against the possible invasion of the sanctity of British orthography by "American spelling" than is the London Times, the solid representative of British thought, the mighty organ-voice of British feeling. Yet the Times is not without orthographic eccentricities of its own, as Matthew Arnold took occasion to point out. In his essay on the "Literary Influence of Academies," he asserts that "every one has noticed the way in which the Times chooses to spell the word diocese; it always spells it diocess, deriving it, I suppose, from Zeus and census.... Imagine an educated Frenchman indulging himself in an orthographical antic of this sort!"

When we read what is written in the Times and the Saturday Review and the Athenæum, sometimes in set articles on the subject, and even more often in casual and subsidiary slurs in the course of book-reviews, we wonder at the vehemence of the feeling displayed. If we did not know that ancient abuses are often defended with more vigor and with louder shouts than inheritances of less doubtful worth, we might suppose that the present spelling of the English language was in a condition perfectedly satisfactory alike to scholar and to student. Such, however, is not the case. The leading philologists of Great Britain and of the United States have repeatedly denounced English spelling as it now is on both sides of the Atlantic. Professor Max Müller at Oxford is no less emphatic than Professor Whitney at Yale. There is now living no scholar of any repute who any longer defends the orthodox and ordinary orthography of the English language.

The fact is that a little learning is quite as dangerous a thing now as it was in Pope's day. Those who are volubly denouncing "American spelling" in the columns of British journals are not students of the history of English speech; they are not scholars in English; in so far as they know anything of the language, they are but amateur philologists. As a well-known writer on spelling reform once neatly remarked, "The men who get their etymology by inspiration are like the poor in that we have them always with us." Although few of them are as ignorant and dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tortured the obviously jocular Welsh rabbit into a pedantic and impossible Welsh rarebit, still the most of their writing serves no good purpose; to quote the apt illustration of a Western humorist, "It has as little influence as the p in pneumonia." Nor do we discover in these specimens of British journalism that abundant urbanity which etymology might lead us to look for in the writing of inhabitants of so large a city as London.

Any one who takes the trouble to inform himself on the subject will soon discover that it is only the half-educated man who defends the contemporary orthography of the English language, and who denounces the alleged "American spelling" of center and honor. The uneducated reader may wonder perchance what the g is doing in sovereign; the half-educated reader discerns in the g a connecting link between the English sovereign and the Latin regno; the well-educated reader knows that there is no philological connection whatever between regno and sovereign.

The most of those who write with ease in British journals, deploring the prevalence of "American spelling," have never carried their education so far as to acquire that foundation of wisdom which prevents a man from expressing an opinion on subjects as to which he is ignorant. The object of education, it has been said, is to make a man know what he knows, and also to know how much he does not know. Despite the close sympathy between the intellectual pursuits, a student of optics is not qualified to express an opinion in esthetics; and on the other hand, a critic of art may easily be ignorant of science. Now literature is one of the arts, and philology is a science. Though men of letters have to use words as the tools of their trade, orthography is none the less a branch of philology, and philology does not come by nature. Literature may even exist without writing, and therefore without spelling. Homer, the trouvères, and the minnesingers practised their art perhaps without the aid of letters. Writing, indeed, has no necessary connection with literature, still less has orthography. A literary critic is rarely a scientific student of language; he has no need to be; but being ignorant, it is the part of modesty for him not to expose his ignorance. To boast of it is unseemly.

Far be it from me to appear as the defender of the "American spelling" which the British journalists denounce. This "American spelling" is less absurd than the British spelling only in so far as it has varied therefrom. Even in these variations there is abundant absurdity. Once upon a time most words that now are spelled with a final c had an added k. Even now both British and American usage retains this k in hammock, although both British and Americans have dropped the needless letter from havoc; while the British retain the k at the end of almanack and the Americans have dropped it. Dr. Johnson was a reactionary in orthography as in politics; and in his dictionary he wilfully put a final k to words like optick, without being generally followed by the publick—as he would have spelled it. Music was then musick, although, even as late as Aubrey's time, it had been musique. In our own day we are witnessing the very gradual substitution of the logical technic for the form originally imported from France—technique. As yet, so far as I have observed, no attempts have been made to modify the foreign spelling of clique and oblique.

I am inclined to think that technic is replacing technique more rapidly—or should I say less slowly?—in the United States than in Great Britain. We Americans like to assimilate our words and to make them our own, while the British have rather a fondness for foreign phrases. A London journalist recently held up to public obloquy as an "ignorant Americanism" the word program, although he would have found it set down in Professor Skeat's Etymological Dictionary. "Programme was taken from the French," so a recent writer reminds us, "and in violation of analogy, seeing that, when it was imported into English, we had already anagram, cryptogram, diogram, epigram, etc." The logical form program is not common even in America, and British writers seem to prefer the French form, as British speakers still give a French pronunciation to charade, which in America has long since been accepted frankly as an English word. So we find Mr. Andrew Lang, in his Angling Sketches,