with the improper. The leaden censures of the _Times,_ for
example, await any excursion beyond its own battered circumlocutions.
Even nowadays, and when they are veterans, Mr. George Meredith and Mr.
Henley get ever and again a screed of abuse from some hot champion of
Lower Division Civil Service prose. "Plain English" such a one will
call his desideratum, as one might call the viands on a New Cut barrow
"plain food." The hostility to the complete language is everywhere. I
wonder just how many homes may not be witnessing the self-same scene as
I write. Some little child is struggling with the unmanageable treasure
of a new-found word, has produced it at last, a nice long word,
forthwith to be "laughed out" of such foolish ambitions by its anxious
parent. People train their children not to speak English beyond a
threadbare minimum, they resent it upon platform and in pulpit, and
they avoid it in books. Schoolmasters as a class know little of the
language. In none of our schools, not even in the more efficient of our
elementary schools, is English adequately taught. And these people
expect the South African Dutch to take over their neglected tongue! As
though the poor partial King's English of the British Colonist was one
whit better than the Taal! To give them the reality of what English
might be: that were a different matter altogether.

These things it is the clear business of our New Republicans to alter.
It follows, indeed, but it is in no way secondary to the work of
securing sound births and healthy childhoods, that we should secure a
vigorous, ample mental basis for the minds born with these bodies. We
have to save, to revive this scattered, warped, tarnished and neglected
language of ours, if we wish to save the future of our world. We should
save not only the world of those who at present speak English, but the
world of many kindred and associated peoples who would willingly enter
into our synthesis, could we make it wide enough and sane enough and