the coming age should not be greatly forwarded by our deliberate
efforts, why it should not be possible within a little while to define
a standard pronunciation of our tongue. It is a less important issue by
far than that of a uniform vocabulary and phraseology, but it is still
a very notable need.

We have available now for the first time, in the more highly evolved
forms of phonograph and telephone, a means of storing, analyzing,
transmitting, and referring to sounds, that should be of very
considerable value in the attempt to render a good and beautiful
pronunciation of English uniform throughout the world. It would not be
unreasonable to require from all those who are qualifying for the work
of education, the reading aloud of long passages in the standard
accent. At present there is no requirement of this sort in England, and
too often our elementary teachers at any rate, instead of being
missionaries of linguistic purity, are centres of diffusion for blurred
and vicious perversions of our speech. They must read and recite aloud
in their qualifying examinations, it is true, but under no specific
prohibition of provincial intonations. In the pulpit and the stage,
moreover, we have ready to hand most potent instruments of
dissemination, that need nothing but a little sharpening to help
greatly towards this end. At the entrance of almost all professions
nowadays stands an examination that includes English, and there would
be nothing revolutionary in adding to that written paper an oral test
in the standard pronunciation. By active exertion to bring these things
about the New Republican could do much to secure that every child of
our English-speaking people throughout the world would hear in school
and church and entertainment the same clear and definite accent. The
child's mother and nurse would be helped to acquire almost insensibly a
sound and confident pronunciation. No observant man who has lived at