Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/246

234 that passed over us a few years ago in relation to spelling, a feature or two of which may be worth recalling. A veteran school-teacher of New York dropped a hurried line to a newspaper, in which two or three words were wrongly spelled. It was a dull season for news and excitement, and so, in its enterprise, journalism sat on this old party, and his life was darkened. He has since gone to that undiscovered country where it is to be hoped that Webster and Worcester have never been heard of; but he has left us struggling with the beggarly elements of a barbarous orthography, and no better off for the storm of reproach to which he was a martyr. His fellow-teachers came to the rescue with indignant letters to the editor, and that remorseless personage published them, bad spelling and all, every time. "Behold," said he, "the state of American education, when its masters are unable to spell their native language!" There seemed no question that the highest achievement of the human mind was to put letters together in exact accordance with some authority; and that to drop or transpose a letter, in the tens of thousands of their arbitrary combinations, that form the words of our language, was an offense that should consign its perpetrator to everlasting ignominy. The thing was all going one way until there arose a rebellious voice in the East, which said to the editor: "Let me take advantage of the present spelling excitement to fatten a grudge I bear against the literary world." The soul that had been thus stirred to utterance was that of Elizur Wright, and he went on, in his pungent way, to say: "A school-master who does not spell correctly by somebody's system should go abroad and stay there. But just here it is that my indignation kindles. Why do we have these illiterate school-masters? I do not stop to blame weak or careless committees: the trouble lies higher. The great masters of English literature, the lawgivers of our language, are such bunglers or charlatans in their own profession, that they ought to be ashamed to fling a pebble at the worst of spellers, or even at the inventor of Egyptian hieroglyphics." After venting his wrath upon the conservators of the present "imperfect, unreasonable, stupid, false plan of visualizing the vocal tongue," he thus proceeds:

"The misery of the matter is, that it is difficult to get any but blockheads to teach such a blockhead system. We do uncommonly well when we get hold of pedantic dances who can teach spelling with a vengeance, and perhaps the shell of grammar. Of course, I do not deny that there are some literary saints, of unquestionable genius, who devote or doom themselves to a painful inculcation into the memories of reluctant or rebellious youth of all the incongruities, contradictions, riddles, and sphinx-puzzles of English orthography." And again: "English orthography is congenial only with stupidity; and, after thirty or forty years of occasional observation in regard to it, I am of opinion that good and successful teachers of spelling can seldom write a page without misspelling several words."

And this is the writer's significant climax: "Of another thing I have no doubt at all, to wit, that learning to spell is a discipline pernicious to good mental habits. The minds of unschooled children are eager for facts and the reasons of them; and they are not satisfied with a reason till they see its force. But, after they have been schooled through the inconsequential mysteries of the spelling-book, where a reason has less chance of living than a mouse in a vacuum, they are ready to swallow any thing the book or the teacher says, with a leaden quietude. No thanks to the portico of our literature, if they do not continue to take things on trust, as long as there is any thing to be so taken."