58o  End  of  Simplified  Spelling.  { lZist!"^ro. 
while  not  necessarily  sufficiently  conclusive  to  warrant  the  abandon- 
ment of  a  campaign  long  and  vigorously  conducted,  may,  after  all, 
seem  to  be  so.  These  are  the  lack  of  public  interest  in  the  proposed 
new  form  of  spelling,  its  failure  to  make  any  appreciable  progress, 
and  its  offensiveness  to  some  members  of  the  association.  The 
movement  to  reform  English  spelling  in  the  United  States  took  definite 
shape  in  the  year  1906,  when  the  Simplified  Spelling  Board  was 
organized  in  New  York  City.  Many  distinguished  men  and  women 
have,  at  one  time  and  another,  been  identified  with  the  campaign, 
and  from  the  first  it  was  liberally  financed.  Reams  of  literature 
in  the  form  of  more  or  less  convincing  propaganda,  have  been  printed 
and  distributed  throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  land,  the 
chief  effort,  especially  early  in  the  campaign,  being  made  to  win  over 
the  support  of  colleges  and  universities  through  appeals  made  to 
their  executives  or  to  those  employed  as  professors  or  instructors. 
The  board  published,  not  long  after  its  organization,  a  list  of  825 
American  college  professors  and  officers  who,  it  was  claimed,  had 
agreed  to  follow  the  prescribed  simplified  form  of  spelling  in  the  use 
of  300  words,  wherever  possible.  Further  impetus  was  given  to 
the  movement,  momentarly  at  least,  in  August,  1906,  when  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt,  then  President  of  the  United  States,  ordered  the 
public  printer  to  adopt  the  spelling  advocated  by  the  board  in  the 
publication  of  all  documents  of  the  executive  departments.  Due 
to  public  protests,  this  order  was  mh>dified,  a  little  later,  to  apply 
only  to  the  official  correspondence  of  the  White  House. 
It  might,  perhaps,  have  been  supposed  that  a  movement  so  thor- 
oughly organized,  so  liberally  financed,  and  quite  generally  indorsed 
by  educators  in  some  parts  of  the  country,  especially  as  it  had  the 
support  and  approval  of  the  editors  of  a  number  of  the  more  popular 
dictionaries,  must  eventually  succeed.  But  the  fact  remains  that 
it  did  not  succeed.  Indeed,  it  never  even  approached  success.  The 
popular  protest  which  reached  President  Roosevelt  seemed  to  express 
the  almost  unanimous  sentiment  of  the  masses.  Those  who  opposed 
arbitrary  innovations  along  the  lines  proposed  insisted,  and  apparently 
with  reason,  that  spelling  reform  should  continue  to  be,  as  it  always 
had  been,  a  matter  of  growth.  Those  persons  who  had  learned  to 
spell  the  words  in  common  use  quite  emphatically  insisted  upon  the 
right  to  continue  the  spellings  they  had  learned.  They  admitted 
that  many  of  these  spellings  were  arbitrary,  in  a  sense,  but  that  they 
were  no  more  arbitrary  than  the  so-called  simplified  forms  prescribed. 
