could with infinite pains work out. It is a jumble and chaos. that cannot be cobbled or mended or patched. It has no single merit, its evils have no alleviations, its defects cannot be covered up or cured by any partial or temporizing measures; and, as every year adds enormously to the difficulties, the reform of it ought to be taken in hand as soon as possible and prosecuted with the vigor of American enterprise.

In America we take credit for our capacity to adapt the cheapest and best tools to every purpose, and we have put to shame our English confreres in the way we have surpassed them. in all material constructions; but in this, the most essential of all reforms, we have nibbled and whittled on the edges of a great movement. We have cut the u out of “honour" and propose to dock the tail of "epilogue," while we leave our children— our posterity-to flounder in a cimmerian bog of confusion, with no effective or well considered effort to extricate them.

The English language has an ample vocabulary—capable of expressing the nicest shades of meaning, of compassing the highest flights of eloquence and the most rhythmical flow of poetic measure; adequate to all the uses of mankind in business, in social life, in science, in philosophy, in song; but the vehicle in which it records and exhibits all these excellencies-its spelled word is the most execrable muddle, the most diabolical burlesque on everything like science that ever chance developed out of ignorance and perversity.

Compute the years wasted in the needless effort to reach, by tedious and labored and devious ways over cruel and barbarous obstructions, the means of acquisition which would be saved by a proper, simple and scientific system, and the result is appalling.

There are by the census of 1890 about twenty-seven million children in the United States between the ages of one and fourteen years. Say one-half of these, fourteen million, are learning to spell,-say twelve millions. One hour to each of these each day of twelve hours would be twelve million hours or one million days. Each month, thirty million days or one million months; each year, one million years, each thirty-three years one million lives. But one hour each day is nothing to the time actually spent. Two hours would be a small estimate, of which at least one-half could be saved by a system that would really spell.

I might well paraphrase Hood's lines and say:

"Oh men with mothers and wives

It is not linen (books) you're wearing out

But human creatures' lives."

But add to all this the vexation to the child, the moral and mental demoralization, the natural tendency to correct methods turned backwards and overthrown; the distress, the tears, the poutings, the punishments, the exasperation, the rebellions, the sense of wrong, of injustice, of oppression-and you have a much more appalling list of evils to encounter and of worse than mere time thrown away,-time spent in blunting mental gifts and moral sensibilities and religious tendencies.

The English alphabet is defective in many ways. It has no sufficient number of proper signs to represent its sounds. It has twenty-six letters to represent from forty to sixty odd sounds. Its letters are of no certain definite sound. Several of them have the same sound. c may be k or it may be s. ph and sometimes v represent the same sound. q may be ka r and ks are the same.

s may be . f and g may be g or j.

The vowels are largely interchangeable. In "word," "bird," "curd," "verd," the vowels o, i, u, and c, have precisely the same sonal value. The first vowel, a, has ten different sounds, represented in thirty-four different ways; e has four, represented in twenty-two ways; i has five, represented in twenty-nine ways; o has five, represented in thirty ways; u has three, represented in twenty-one y in "cry" has the sound of i represented in fifteen. ways. No sign (letter) ought to represent more than one sound. No sound ought to have more than one sign to represent it. Instead of forty or sixty letters we have at least one hundred in effect,—and how many more no mortal can tell.

The object of spelling ought to be to produce by a combination of elementary signs of sound a clear and certain indication of the sound of the word given.

If there were to be found in English spelling any indication of design or intelligent contrivance, it would be that it was meant to avoid as much as possible this object.

As to the twenty-six letters : A letter is a sign of one of the simple sounds of a language. If we take the definition of a letter as correct, then we have, instead of twenty-six letters, a number that it would be almost impossible to ascertain.

In the first place, if a letter represents more than one sound

it ought to be counted for as many letters as it represents sounds. Thus c, when it represents the sound of k ought to be counted as one letter; when it represents s, as another, and when used in connection with h, as a third. g in "good" is a sign of one sound; in "gentle" it is the sign of another sound, and it ought to be counted, therefore, as two.

a has ten sounds and ought to be counted as ten letters. e should be counted as four letters, i as four, o as five, u as three, s as two,-say thirty-three letters out of eight signs. In another class are compound letters. d-a spells da (da) and a represents a sound. d-ay has the same sound, and ay is simply a sign of the same as a.—a simple sound. So ay comes within the definition of a letter. To say that it is composed of two letters combined, or to say it is a diagraph, is only to say it is a more complex sign than the other a. It is, in fact, no more different than the printed a from the written a. In "ale" the two parts of the sign (a-c) are separated by the /; but the two are the sign of a sound. Without the e following the the sign would be incomplete, and make the word Al as in "Alfred."

ough in "though" is just as much a sign of a simple sound as o in "tho;" and it is, therefore, a letter.-but one requiring many movements to form it-four times the movement in type-setting and four times the space in print that the simple o requires. But ough has nine different sounds; as in "though," "thought." "trough," "through," "lough," "plough," "rough," "cough," and "hiccough."

So ough, as representing a simple sound in each case, is a letter, but as representing nine sounds, it is, in fact, nine letters. "Read" (red) and "read" (reed) are different words, though they differ not one iota in shape. So ough in "though" is not the same letter that it is in "trough," though it has the same shape.

eigh in “freight" and eigh in "sleight" are two letters and not one; for though they have the same shape they do not have the same sound, and are, therefore, as distinct as "read" (did read) and "read" (in will read).

What we call silent letters are merely parts of letters. In "k-i-1-n" the ln is merely the sign of the sound /, and is, therefore, a letter, sign of a simple sound.

Now follow all these complex letters through the ten thousand words of an ordinary vocabulary, and how many letters have we?

It would be easy to enumerate a hundred; it is impossible to conjecture how many more.

To the objection, then, to having sixty odd letters, viz. that it would be difficult to learn so many, my reply is, we now represent all these sounds, and of course we have as many signs as sounds. That is we do have some means to represent each sound. If a represents ten sounds we have to learn ten a's.

Now, it would

be much easier, because less confusing, to learn ten letters than to learn ten sounds of one letter. But "eigh" (ā) is as much a letter a as the regular a; ai is as much a sign of ah (ă) as of a; a-e in "are" is as much a sign of a as ai in "air." Now, all these duplicate signs are so many letters,-all to be learned; and each is fully as difficult as any one sign for each would be.

Now take ten sounds of a represented in thirty-four different ways. This is twenty-three signs (letters) to be learned, in addition to the twenty-six letters of the alphabet,-and each needless. But add this twenty-three to the sixty-odd which exist, and we have eighty-odd signs, when sixty would do.

u is ew in "chew," ieu in "lieu," ue in "true," oo in "loo;" our in "billet-doux," ough in "through," ui in "cruise," ault in "sault" (soo).

Now observe that each of the combinations is a character, a sign of the sound,-in other words a letter-ew, ieu, ue, oo, our, ough, ui, ault,-nine different characters (letters), each to be learned. Add these to the simple u and the alphabet has eight useless letters, making ninety-one.

Again, every letter with two sounds is, in effect, as many letters as sounds, just as every word with two sounds is two words; thus "read" (reed) and "read" (red) are two words; a in "ale" is not a sign of the same thing as a in "air."

eigh in "freight" and in "height" is not one sign but two. In "freight" it is the sign of a as in "ate:" in "height" it is the sign of i as in "bite." When you have learned it as the sign of one thing it is just as hard to learn as the sign of another thing as any other sign would be, with the aggravation that you never can learn by looking at it when it is the sign of a and when of i. But, in effect and for difficulty of learning, count it two letters. This will make ninty-three. Take ough in "plough," "dough," "lough," "through," "cough," "slough," (sluff), "slough," (slue), "wrought," "hiccough,"-nine sounds (letters).

So we have over one hundred, with but few precincts heard from, and the returns from whole counties and sections not sent in.

In the year 1853 a learned German, Prof. Lepsius, of the University of Berlin, devised and published an alphabet intended to embrace signs for the sounds of all known languages, which has been designated the Standard Alphabet: This consists of thirty signs of vowel sounds and forty-eight signs of consonant sounds. In the American Cyclopedia the sounds of these are represented partly by English words, and partly by French, German, Arabic, Sanscrit, Hebrew, and Chinese. Fifteen vowels are pronounced by analogy to English words and sixteen by words in other languages, while twenty-one consonants are given with English words as keys. A fair inference may be that these thirtyseven letters represent the different sounds of the English tongue at least with enough fullness to give the means of presenting all the words of the language with practically sufficient accuracy.

A late cyclopedia gives the number of vowel sounds in English as twenty-three, or rather, it gives twenty-three examples which it uses in defining pronunciations. Webster gives eighteen. The Century Dictionary gives twenty-one, with eleven additional too slight to be enumerated as distinct. Harvey's School Grammar says there are forty-two elementary sounds. My best efforts to determine the necessary letters for myself result in giving fifteen vowel sounds, as follows: a in "ale," are in "all," ah in "at," oh in "not," e in "eat," eh in "get," uh in "verse," i in "bite," ih in "bit" o in "no," oo in "coo," ooh in "book," oh in "nor;" u in "unite," uh in "cull," ooh in "full," (fifteen sounds). This does not include a with the sound "ooh." To these add twenty-one consonants, and you have thirty-six or thirty-seven characters necessary to represent the simple sounds of the English tongue.

So to the objection to a scientific alphabet that it will require the learning of so many letters (say forty), the answer is forty is better than the four hundred it may be, or than the hundred it must be.

But the number is not the main trouble. It is true, duplicates are not necessary. But we see that each of these has the element of uncertainty. c is a duplicate of k and of s (signs of two sounds that have no element in common). When you meet that letter in a word new to you it is impossible in most cases to tell which it represents. If you spell "Cicero" with a k, no one can