noble enough for their honour.

To expect that so ample a cause as this should find any support among
the festering confusion of the old politics is to expect too much.
There is no party for the English language anywhere in the world. We
have to take this problem as we took our former problem and deal with
it as though the old politics, which slough so slowly, were already
happily excised. To begin with, we may give our attention to the
foundation of this foundation, to the growth of speech in the
developing child.

From the first the child should hear a clear and uniform pronunciation
about it, a precise and careful idiom and words definitely used. Since
language is to bring people together and not to keep them apart, it
would be well if throughout the English-speaking world there could be
one accent, one idiom, and one intonation. This there never has been
yet, but there is no reason at all why it should not be. There is
arising even now a standard of good English to which many dialects and
many influences are contributing. From the Highlanders and the Irish,
for example, the English of the South are learning the possibilities of
the aspirate _h_ and _wh_, which latter had entirely and the
former very largely dropped out of use among them a hundred years ago.
The drawling speech of Wessex and New England--for the main features of
what people call Yankee intonation are to be found in perfection in the
cottages of Hampshire and West Sussex--are being quickened, perhaps
from the same sources. The Scotch are acquiring the English use of
_shall_ and _will,_ and the confusion of reconstruction is
world-wide among our vowels. The German _w_ of Mr. Samuel Weller
has been obliterated within the space of a generation or so. There is
no reason at all why this natural development of the uniform English of