1S89.] 327 



in practical action, not only free from the risks of individual preferences 

 or caprice, but with the knowledge that he is acting on the advice and iu 

 accordance with the practice of scholars of the highest eminence in 

 English filology." 



The report of the State Commission continues : "Without venturincr to 

 recommend any of these, or any orthografic novelties, the Commission 

 would call attention to the fact that many words are spelt in two ways in 

 our dictionaries, and that it is therefore necessary for a clioice to be made 

 between the diflerent spellings. We find ' honor' and ' honour,' ' travel- 

 ler' and 'traveler,' 'comptroller' and 'controller,' and hundreds of such 

 pairs. In these words one way of spelling is better than the other on 

 grounds of reason, simpler, more economical, more truthful to sound ety- 

 mology and scientific law. 



"The Commission respectfully submits tliat the regulation of the or- 

 thogrufy of the public documents is of sufficient importance to call for 

 legislative action, and that the public printer be instructed, whenever 

 variant spellings of a word are found in the current dictionaries, to use in 

 the public documents the simpler form which accords with the amended 

 spelling recommended by the joint action of the American Philological 

 Association and English Philological Society." 



It is this recommendation of the State Commission that is the objective 

 point of our discussion. Your Committee is unable to see how there can 

 be any difference of opinion upon the following points of the argument : 



1. That the English language is grossly misspelt, and is therefore an 

 obstruction to the etymologist; a needless consumer of time, money and 

 energy ; a falsifier of history ; a perverler of the logical and of the moral 

 faculty ; a hindrance to education ; a chief cause of illiteracy and a clog 

 upon the wheels of general progress. 



3. That either a complete or a pariial reform is desirable. 



3. That as partial reforms have been successfully wrought in the past 

 and present centuries in English, and complete reforms in other Ian- 

 guages, it is feasible to hasten and direct the still further improvement of 

 our so-called orthografy. 



Your Committee heartily believes, with Prof. W. D. Whitney, that "it 

 is altogether natural and praiseworthy that we should be strongly altacht 

 to a lime-honored institution, in the possession of which we have grown 

 up, and which we have learned to look upon as a part of the subsisting, 

 fabric of our speech ; it is natural that we should love even its abuses, and 

 should feel the present inconvenience to ourselves of abandoning it much 

 more keenly than any prospective advantage which may result to us or 

 our successors from such action ; that we should therefore look with 

 jealousy upon anyone who attempts to change it, questioning narrowly 

 his right to set himself up as its reformer, and the merits of the reform he 

 proposes. But this natural and laudable feeling becomes a mere blind 



