264 ANALYTIC ORTHOGRAPHY. 
15. Three millions of people can support a literature in all its branches, from primers 
and almanacs to encyclopeedias and universal histories. This may be given in round num- 
bers, as the amount of population supporting Danish, Swedish, and modern Greek; and 
about a million Albanians are divided upon three alphabets, the Italian, Greek, and a na- 
tive one of 52 characters, more different from the Greek and Italian than these are differ- 
ent from each other. A journal is considered to be well supported when 2,000 copies can 
be disposed of, and in the Book Trade, works devoted to special branches of knowledge 
are often printed in editions of 250 copies, not as rarities for bibliomaniacs, but to supply 
the probable demand. 
16. When more rational modes of orthography arise, there will therefore be much danger, 
not from the dearth of books, but from the multiplicity of alphabets which will be pro- 
posed—and it is possible that there may be half a dozen in the British Islands, and twice 
as many on the Vesperian side of the Atlantic. 
17. There is a politic reason for a reformed orthography. The age demands it, and 
the population is moving steadily towards it, unconvinced by platitudes on the Study of 
Words by those who have not exhibited that acquaintance with the science which the 
discussion of its principles demands. The reform should be undertaken with all the aids 
that science and scholarship can command. Let the fields of philology, physiology, epi- 
graphy, and living speech be explored, and let an alphabet be erected, so free from those 
national perversions which national vanity might wish to be legitimate, that no one will 
have the power to say—“ They are only exhibiting the dress of their vernacular,”—‘“ This 
letter has a purely English power,’—“ That is a French corruption.” 
18. Let the alphabet be capable of enlargement, to render it adaptible to all languages, 
whether English, Italian, or Tahitian, and equally suitable for the dialect of the peasant 
and the tables of the comparative philologist; and let it not run counter to the great ety- 
mologic and metric principle which requires that all records, statements, and comparisons, 
shall be made in symbols, each of which shall represent the same phenomena. 
19. The great success of phonography shows that not a single concession which is false 
in principle, need be made to conciliate English sympathies, (§12,) or to preserve so-called 
English analogies; and it would be unkind and ungenerous to all nations having the allied 
pairs of vowels in they them, marine mariner, he his, were the attempt made to assign cha- 
racters to them as diverse as a, e, for the former, and e, i, for the latter. The unlettered 
five millions feel the affinity between the vowels of break and wreck, who would see no more 
fitness in the dissimilar forms a, e, than the chemist finds in the cumbersome notation of 
the alchemists. 
