114 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



should be easily understood, acquired and used. All irregularities^ 

 anomalies and inconsistencies should be eradicated as completely as 

 possible. This would appear especially true in the case of the Eng- 

 lish tongue, which, like the Anglo-Saxon race, is destined to extend 

 its dominion to every quarter of the globe. In my opinion the 

 greatest obstacle in the way of the universality of the language we 

 speak is its cumbrous and archaic orthography. Despite this the 

 language is rapidly gaining ground, but who is competent to forecast 

 that degree of increased impetus which a phonetic system of spell- 

 ing would give the conquering Saxon tongue ? 



The six great nations of the world had, at the beginning of 

 1890, the following number of followers : Portuguese, fifteen millions ; 

 Italian, twenty-nine millions ; French, fifty millions ; Spanish, forty- 

 five millions ; German, sixty-eight millions ; and English was spoken 

 by at least fifty millions of the subjects of Victoria, and by an equal 

 number of citizens of the United States. In ten years Portugese 

 rose from fourteen to fifteen millions ; Italian, from twenty-eight to 

 twenty-nine ; French, from forty-one to filty ; Spanish, from forty- 

 four to forty five ; German, fifty-six to sixty-eight ; while English 

 rose from eighty to one hundred millions. The question occurs to 

 my mind — of the three hundred and four millions of souls compos- 

 ing the British Empire, how many of these, their children, and their 

 children's children will speak the language of England ? Further, 

 sum up the time lost by each unit, composing this enormous national 

 mass, in tracing useless alphabetic characters, calculate the addi- 

 tional time and labor which our present orthographic system de- 

 mands and which all experience, then multiply this by the millions 

 employing it, and we shall realize how important the question of 

 reform is ; we shall see a total loss of millions of years of that most 

 precious of all things — Time. 



Reprinting. — It has been urged by some that reformed spell- 

 ing would render existing books useless, or nearly so. The conten- 

 tion is, however, groundless, for the simple reason that the desired 

 reform would not effect so great a change in the appearance of the 

 words as is generally supposed. In hundreds of words the change- 

 would amount to no more than a slight transposition of letters, in 

 others the omission of superfluous characters. The difficulty in 

 reading old works arises from the presence of obsolete words and 

 allusions, and but slightly from the difference in the spelling. The 



