distinct sign, seemed a most cumbersome and embarrassing
complication to the ancient scholars--that is to say, after the
time arrived when any one gave such an idea expression. We can
imagine them saying: "You will oblige us to use four signs
instead of one to write such an elementary syllable as 'bard,'
for example. Out upon such endless perplexity!" Nor is such a
suggestion purely gratuitous, for it is an historical fact that
the old syllabary continued to be used in Babylon hundreds of
years after the alphabetical system had been introduced.[7]
Custom is everything in establishing our prejudices. The Japanese
to-day rebel against the introduction of an alphabet, thinking it
ambiguous.

Yet, in the end, conservatism always yields, and so it was with
opposition to the alphabet. Once the idea of the consonant had
been firmly grasped, the old syllabary was doomed, though
generations of time might be required to complete the
obsequies--generations of time and the influence of a new nation.
We have now to inquire how and by whom this advance was made.


THE ALPHABET ACHIEVED

We cannot believe that any nation could have vaulted to the final
stage of the simple alphabetical writing without tracing the
devious and difficult way of the pictograph and the syllabary. It
is possible, however, for a cultivated nation to build upon the
shoulders of its neighbors, and, profiting by the experience of
others, to make sudden leaps upward and onward. And this is
seemingly what happened in the final development of the art of