Chapter I (6)

I wish to congratulate you on the excellence of the REVIEW, both
from a literary and mechanical standpoint. As a "worker," "a
member of the Union," it might be inferred that I endorse the
views of the critics given on page 432 of the second number. Not
so. It is such views as his that harm the unthinking--those who
think capital is the emblem of wickedness.

I believe that individual merit and worth are the only things
worth while. The workman who puts his best efforts into his labor,
and takes a personal pride in making his productions as nearly
perfect as possible, will be recognized, and his individual worth
to his employer will raise him above the "common level." All this
rot about a "ruling oligarchy" "grinding down the poorer class" is
dangerous. The man who has no ambition above ditch digging, and
who endeavors to throw out as little dirt in a day as he possibly
can, will always be one of "the submerged." It lies with each
one--outside of unavoidable physical or mental
infirmities--whether he shall rise or sink.

Again I must congratulate you on the stand you are taking in THE
UNPOPULAR REVIEW. I "take" and read twenty to twenty-five
magazines and for over forty years have been trying to educate
myself to a right way of thinking, and the result is I believe as
above briefly outlined.

Especially good is _The Greeks on Religion and Morals_, also _The
Soul of Capitalism, Trust-Busting as a National Pastime_, and _Our
Government Subvention to Literature_.

* * * * *

Possibly some of you are disappointed at not finding this number as full as the daily papers of wisdom on War and the Mexican situation. In one sense we are disappointed ourselves: for we had made arrangements for at least one article of that general nature from one of our best qualified contributors; but when it came time to write it (speaking by the calendar), he showed the excellence of his qualifications by saying that, considering the situation and the function of this REVIEW, it was _not_ time--that the situation had not yet become mature enough or broad enough for any general conclusions--for any treatment beyond that already well given by the newspapers and other organs of frequent publication, and that they were giving all the details called for. We will wait, then, and try to philosophize when the time comes.

We find, however, that with little deliberate intention on our part, this number has turned out "seasonable" in another sense, and hope you will find it so. Witness the articles on _Chautauqua_, and _Railway Junctions_, and _Tips_ (entitled _A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism_) and several others.

_Philosophy in Fly Time_

In the old days, before the destruction of the white pines removed the chief source of American inventiveness--the universal habit of whittling--every boy had a jackknife, and also had boxes, sometimes of wood, sometimes of writing paper, in which he kept flies. Now he has neither flies nor jackknife.

Then, when he wanted a fly, nine times out of ten he could catch one with a sweep of the hand. That was before the fly was charged with an amount of bad deeds, if they really were as bad as represented, which would have destroyed the human race long before the plagues of Egypt; or if not before the fly plague, would have caused that plague to leave no Egyptians alive to enjoy the later ones. With these new opinions of the fly, began a crusade against him; and now the boys can't have any more fun with him--that is, only good boys can--the kind that catch him with illusive traps, for a cent a hundred. The other kind of boys may occasionally be sports enough to hunt him with the swatter; but it's pretty poor hunting: for the game is so shy that generally before you get within reach of him, he is off: so swatting him is difficult, while catching him by hand, as we boys used to, is virtually impossible.

Now for some questions profound enough to befit our pages. (I) Have only a select group of very alert and quick flies survived? or (II) Have the flies told each other that that big clumsy brute with only two legs to walk on, and two aborted ones which do all sorts of foolish things--the brute with only one lens to an eye (though he sometimes puts a glass one over it) and a pitifully aborted proboscis--the brute that has no wings, and can't get ahead more than about once his own length in a second--that this clumsy brute had at last got so jealous of the six legs, hundred-lensed eyes, proboscis, wings and speed of the fly, that he had started a new crusade against him, and must be specially avoided?

Then, after it is ascertained whether the timidity of the flies is because this story has been passed around among them, or only because men have already killed off all but the specially quick and timid ones; we hope our investigators may find an answer to the farther question: (III) How, if a tenth of what some folks say against flies is true, the human race has so long survived?

To avoid misapprehension, it should be added that despite the availability, in our boyhood, of flies as playmates, we don't like 'em, especially when they light on our hands to help us write articles for this REVIEW.

_Setting Bounds to Laughter_

That there is even a measure of personal liberty on the earth, is one of our most pointed proofs that the universe is governed by design. For liberty is loved neither by the many nor by the few; its defense has always been unpopular in the extreme, and can be manfully undertaken only in an age of moral heroism. The present is no heroic age, and hence our personal rights fall one by one, without defense, and apparently without regret. The losses thus incurred must be left to future historians to weigh and to lament. There is, however, one of our natural rights, now cruelly beset by its enemies, that is too precious to surrender to the threnodies of the future historians. This is the right to laugh.

It is scarcely a quarter of a century since the first appearance of organized efforts to curb the spirit of laughter. All good men and women were hectored into believing that one should weep, not laugh, over the absurdities of men in their cups. Next, we were warned that it is unseemly and unChristian to laugh at a fellow-man's discomfiture--an awkward social situation, a sermon or a political oration wrecked by stage fright, or a poem spoilt by a printer's stupidity. Under shelter of the dogma that to laugh at the ridiculous is unlawful, there have recently grown into vigor multitudinous anti-laughter alliances, racial, national and professional. Not many years ago a censorship of Irish jokes was established, and this was soon followed by an index expurgatorious of Teutonic jokes. Our colored fellow citizens promptly advanced the claim that jokes at the expense of their race are "in bad taste"; and country life enthusiasts solemnly affirmed that the rural and suburban jokes are nothing short of national disasters. A recent press report informs us that the suffragette joke has been excluded from the vaudeville circuits throughout the country. And the movement grows apace. Domestic servants, stenographers, politicians, college professors, and clergymen are organizing to establish the right of being ridiculous without exciting laughter.

But what does it all matter? What is laughter but an old-fashioned aid to digestion, more or less discredited by current medical authority? It is time we learned that laughter has a social significance: it is the first stage in the process of understanding one's fellow man. Professor Bergson to the contrary notwithstanding, you can not laugh with your intellect alone. An essential element of your laughter is sympathy. You can not laugh at an idiot, nor at a superman. You can not laugh at a Hindoo or a Korean; you can hardly force a smile to your lips over the conduct of a Bulgar, a Serb, or a Slovak. You are beginning to find something comic in the Italian, because you are beginning to know him. And all the world laughs at the Irishman, because all the world knows him and loves him.

When Benjamin Franklin walked down the streets of Philadelphia, carrying a book under his arm, and munching a crust of bread, just one person observed him, a rosy maiden, who laughed merrily at him. As our old school readers narrated, with naïve surprise, this maiden was destined to become Franklin's faithful wife. And yet psychology should have led us to expect such a result. The stupidest small boy making faces or turning somersaults before the eyes of his pig-tailed inamorata, evidences his appreciation of the sentimental value of the ridiculous. When did we first grant some small corner in our hearts to the Chinese? It was when we were introduced to Bret Harte's gambler:

For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

The natural history of the racial or professional joke is easily written. At the outset it is crude and cruel, wholly at the expense of the group represented. In time the world wearies of an unequal contest, and we have a new order of jokes, in which the intended victim acquits himself well. This, too, gives way to a higher order, in which race, nationality or profession is employed merely as a cloak for common humanity. The successive stages mark the progress in assimilation, induced, in large measure, by laughter. There is no other social force so potent in creating mutual understanding and practical fraternity of spirit; in establishing the essential unity of mankind underneath its phenomenal diversity. Setting bounds to laughter: why, this is to indenture the angel of charity to the father of lies and the lord of hate.

_A Post Graduate School for Academic Donors_

At a recent meeting of an University Montessori Club the case of donors to colleges and universities was reported on by a special committee. The majority report drew a pretty heavy indictment. It was shown that the givers to colleges and universities seldom considered the real needs of their beneficiaries. Donors liked to give expensive buildings without endowment for upkeep, liked to give vast athletic fields, rejoiced in stadiums, affected memorial statuary and stained glass windows, dabbled in landscape gardening, but seldom were known either to give anything unconditionally or, specifically, to destine a gift for such uninspiring needs as more books or professors' pay. The result of giving without first considering the needs of the benefited college or university, was that every gift made the beneficiary more lopsided. Certain universities were almost capsized by their incidental architecture. Others were subsidizing graduate students to whom the conditions of successful research were denied. Still others were calling great specialists to the teaching force without providing the apparatus for the pursuit of these specialties. Others preferred to offer financial aid to students who were poor--in every sense. Donors apparently without exception had single-track minds. They saw plainly enough what they wanted to give, but never took the pains to see the donation in its relation to the institution as a whole. The majority report, which was drawn by our famous Latinist, Professor Claudius Senex, concluded with the despairing note _Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_. The minority report was delivered orally by young Simpson Smith of the department of banking and finance. He "allowed" that everything alleged by the majority report was true, but saw no use in dwelling on such truths, since donors always had done and always would do just as they darned pleased.

The Club took a more hopeful view of the case, and it was voted that our Club should resolve itself into the trustees and faculty of a Post Graduate School for Academic Donors. Our committee recommended that we qualify our advanced students by conferring the lower degree of Heedless Donor (H.D.) every year upon all givers who can be shown to have given at random. No method of instruction seemed more appropriate than the seminar plan of practical exercises based on concrete instances. The first laboratory experiment was performed in the presence of a Seminar of seven H.D.'s. in a specially called meeting of married professors attired only in bath gowns borrowed from the crews and base ball teams. Into this assembly the class of H.D.'s was suddenly introduced. They naturally inquired into the meaning of the spectacle, and were informed that in no case did the mere salary of these professors enable them to wear clothes at all. "But you do usually wear clothes?" inquired a student of a favorite professor. "How do you get them?" "By University extension lecturing at ten dollars a lecture" was the quiet answer. Another professor explained that he got his clothes by tutoring dull students, another by book reviewing. One somewhat shamefacedly said the clothes came from his wife's money. One declined to answer, and, as a matter of fact, his clothes are habitually first worn by a more fortunate elder brother.

On the whole the results of our first seminary exercise were satisfactory. One student immediately drew a considerable check for the salary fund, another, who had been planning to give a hockey rink, said he would think things over. Still a third deposited forty pairs of slightly worn trousers with the university treasurer, "for whom it might concern." Only one accepted the demonstration contentedly. He admitted that low pay and extra work were hard on the Professors, but he also felt that these outside activities advertised the university and were good business. Of course you wore out some professors in the process, but you could always get others.

Our second seminary exercise was of a less spectacular sort. The post graduate donors were each provided with a bibliography. This in every instance contained the titles of books that a particular professor or graduate student in the university would need to consult for his studies of the ensuing week. It was briefly explained by Professor Senex that original research could not be successfully accomplished without reference to all the original sources and to the writings of other scholars. The bibliographies ran from ten titles or so to nearly a hundred, according to the nature of the particular research involved. The exercise consisted in going to the university library and matching these titles of desiderata with the books actually in the catalogue. After varying intervals, the post graduate donors returned with their report. Nobody had found more than half the books sought for: many had found less.

The effect of this demonstration was interesting. The donor who had tended towards the hockey rink, instead transferred his $100,000 to the book purchase fund. He said he guessed the old place needed real books more than it needed artificial ice. Others followed his example according to their ability.

The student who was satisfied with our bath robe faculty meeting, came back from the library equally pleased. He had not compared his bibliography with the catalogue, but a brief general inspection had convinced him that there were already more books in the library than anybody could read. His intention held firm to give his Alma Mater a tower higher than any university tower on record and containing a chime of bells that periodically played the college song. The tower was naturally to bear his name, which was also his dear mother's.

_A Suggestion Regarding Vacations_

Why wouldn't it be well for the country colleges to shorten their summer vacations, and lengthen their winter ones? Then urban students would not, for so long a period in summer, be put to their trumps to find out what to do with themselves; and, what is more important, in winter both faculty and students would have increased opportunity for metropolitan experience. In the summer vacations, the cities are empty of music, drama, and most else of what makes them distinctively worth while. Intellectually, the country needs the city at least as much as, morally, the city needs the country.

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A few hundred persons of the kind whose help is sought by this advertisement would have the salvation of the republic in their hands. But somehow those who have the leisure generally lack the desire; and those who have the desire generally lack the leisure.

_Simplified Spelling_

After receiving, in answer to the invitation in our first number, a few bitter objections to simplified spelling, we have felt like apologizing each time we approached the subject. Perhaps the best apology we can make is that apparently the majority of our readers are interested in it. Therefore we hope that the others will tolerate as equably as they can, the devotion of a little space to it in the interest of the majority. Perhaps the objectors may ultimately be able to settle the difficulty as we and our house have settled another unconquerable nuisance--the dandelions on our lawns--: we have concluded to like them.

Our recent correspondence regarding Simplified Spelling has developed a few points which we submit to those who abominate it, those who favor it, and those who, like the eminent school-superintendent we have already quoted, and like ourselves for that matter, do both:

To a leading Professor of Greek:

I am more hopeful than you that the repetition of a consonant
beginning the second syllable of a dissyllable, to close the
preceding syllable, as in "differ", "fiddle", "gobble", etc.,
_wil_ "be generally accepted", especially in view of the fact that
it is _alreddy_ "generally accepted", and needs only to be
extended to a minority of words.

"Annutther" is not "a fair illustration". On the contrary, it is
an exception that I probably was very injudicious to call any
attention to; and the trouble with you scholars, I find all the
way thru, is that you permit those little exceptions to influence
you too much. If a good simplification is ever effected, it will
be by cutting Gordian knots, and you all of you seem absolutely
incapable of anything of the kind. I don't expect anyhow to make
much out of a man who will spell "peepl" "peopl". Imagine all this
said with a grin, not a frown!!

You wil never get back to "the old sounds" of the vowels, in God's
world.

As to the long sounds, I am going in for all I am worth on the
double vowels. I alreddy agree with the English Society on
"faather", "feel" and "scuul", and am going to do all I can for
_niit_, and for spredding the _oo_ in _floor_ and _door_ into
_snore_, _more_, _hole_, _poke_, etc. "Awl", "cow" and "go" are
spelt wel, and their spelling shoud be spred. These seem to be the
lines of least resistance. I find that they work first-rate in my
own riting.

You make enuf serious objections to diacritical marks, but my
serious objection to them is that they ar obstacles to lerners,
especially forreners.

From his answer:

All right; I catch the grin, and cheerfully grin back. The
business of a scholar (Emerson's "man thinking", Plato's [Greek:
philosophos]) is to take as long views as he can; in this case, to
look far beyond the possibilities of my life-time. The more you
people with the shorter views, as I venture to think them, agitate
for and practise each little partial solution, the more you help
on the threshing out which must go on for many years before we can
arrive at any general solution. So, more power to your elbow!

Meantime my own spelling will continue to be--like the
conventional spelling of the printers of today--a hodge-podge of
inconsistencies, quite indefensible on rational grounds, and
varying with circumstances. Of course the rational way to spell
_people_ is _piipl_, or _pipl_.

Which we think is an attempt to bolster up a lost cause.

From another reader:

Your closing sentence in the first number of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW
states with a most distressing combination of vowels and
outlandish collocation of consonants that you would like to hear
from your readers on the subject.... Z is not a pretty letter, and
to see it so frequently usurping the place so long held by s is
far from gratifying to the eye....

Suppose you establish to your own satisfaction a method for
assigning sound values; how will you reach the differences in
vowel sounds that prevail in the United States? The New
Englander's mouthing of _a_ differs from that of the Northern New
Yorker, and both differ greatly from that of the
Southerner--indeed, in the different Southern States there is
variation.... At first I was interested in simplified spelling,
but the eccentricities developed by its advocates alienated me
long since, so I beg of you, drop it.

From our answer:

I delayed thanking you for your letter of the 29th until there
should be time for you to see the April-June number.

I hope you are feeling better now.

If you are not, I do not think I can do much to console you,
because when a man has been irritated into that position where the
alleged beauty of a letter counts in so serious a question, he is
probably beyond mortal help.

I have no desire "to reach the differences in vowel sounds that
prevail in the United States". There is not much difference among
cultivated people. Probably a fair standard would be the
conversation at the Century Club, where there are visitors from
Maine to California, and hardly any noticeable difference in
pronunciation.

There seems to be no disagreement among authorities that a
simplified spelling would save a great deal of time among
children....

Of course I have not been able to answer most of the letters I
have received on the subject. I single yours out because you have
had a fall from grace, and I feel guilty of having had something
to do with it, by presenting stronger meat than was necessary, in
our January number. I have fought on the Executive Committee of
the Spelling Board against publishing anything of the English
S.S.S.'s proposed improvements, for fear of arousing such
prejudice as yours; and yet in our first number, I was insensibly
led into, myself, publishing things that looked just as
outlandish.

As I said at the outset, I hope you feel better since seeing the
April-June number, and should be glad to know how you do feel.

From his reply:

Thank you very much for the courtesy of your letter of 9th April.
I was surprised to receive it, as I did not suppose that your
multifarious duties would permit you to notice my rather feeble
protest. I was somewhat amused that you should think my irritation
so extreme as to call for an effort to console me. I am sure I
appreciate your attempt to do so. But really, I was not so hard
hit as you thought, because I do not expect in my day (I am no
longer a young man) to see the champions of "simplified spelling"
(some of it seems to me the reverse of "simplified") gain such
headway as to materially mar my pleasure in the printed page, for
I do not believe you will allow the atrocities of the last few
pages of your first number to creep into the delightful essays
which render THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW such pleasant and profitable
reading....

I do not think any great respect is due the opinion of those who
think that a simplified spelling would save a great deal of time
among children, for it also seems to have its rules which will
present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of
our present system....

Why _thru_? U does not always have the sound of double _o_--very
rarely in fact. Why not _throo_--if the aim is to make the written
sign correspond to the sound. Thru suggests _huh_.

From our answer:

Regarding "thru", you justly say that _u_ does not always have the
sound of _oo_. The only sound of _oo_ worthy of respect, with
which I have an acquaintance, is in "door" and "floor". The idea
of using it to represent a _u_ sound is perhaps the culminating
absurdity of our spelling.

Your statement that simplified spelling "seems to have its rules
which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the
peculiarities of our present system" overlooks the advantage that
writing with a phonetic alphabet, like those of Europe, has over
writing with purely conventional characters, as in China. Now
English writing is probably the least phonetic in Europe.
Simplifying it in any of the well-known proposed methods would be
making it more phonetic, and consequently easier. At present it is
a mass of contradictions, and the rules that can be extracted from
it are overburdened with exceptions. Simplification will decrease
both the exceptions and the rules themselves. There are now
several ways of representing each of many sounds, and therefore
several "rules" to be learned for each of such sounds.
Simplification will tend to reduce those rules to one for each
sound, and so far as it succeeds, will _not_ "present as much
difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present
system."

All the degrees of reformed spelling now in use are professedly but transitional. They may gradually advance into a respectable degree of consistency, but we expect that to be reached quicker by a coherent survival among the warring elements proposed by the S.S.S., the S.S.B. and the better individual reformers. Probably there is already more agreement than disagreement among these elements.

While the others are fighting it out, the various transition styles will do something to prepare parents to accept a more nearly perfect style for their children, and perhaps take an interest in seeing the various counsels of perfection fight each other.

A few words have already found their way into advertisements--_tho_, _thru_, _thoro_ (a damnable way of spelling _thurro_), and the shortened terminal _gram(me)s_, _og(ue)s_ and _et(te)s_; and these and a few more have found their way into correspondence on commonplace subjects; and the interest in the topic, especially among educators, is spreading. But most of the inconsistencies will probably bother and delay children and forreners until they are given something with some approach to consistency.

* * * * *

After we fight to something like agreement on a system, how are we to get it going?

It does not seem extravagant to expect that as soon as the weight of scholarly opinion endorses a vocabulary from our present alphabet consistent enough to afford a base for a reasonable spelling book, spelling books and readers will be prepared for the schools, and adopted by advanced teachers. Many are clamoring for such now. When the youngsters have mastered these, which they will do in a small fraction of the time wasted on their present books, they will of their own accord pick up without troubling their teachers a knowledge of the present forms. This they have always done when their teaching has been by the various phonetic methods with special letters, and have done both in much less time than they have needed for learning in the ordinary way. But they will prefer the reasonable forms, and this demand the publishers will probably not be slow to supply.