the counsel of perfection to the region of manifest practicability. For
that there is needed attention, industry, and an intelligent use of a
fair sum of money. We want an industrious committee, and we want one or
two rich men. A series of books, a model course of instruction, has to
be planned and made, tried over, criticised, revised and altered. When
the right way is no longer indicated by prophetic persons pointing in a
mist, but marked out, levelled, mapped and fenced, then the scholastic
profession, wherever the English language is spoken, has to be lured
and driven along it. The New Republican must make his course cheap,
attractive, easy for the teacher and good for the teacher's pocket and
reputation. Just as there are plays that, as actors say, "act
themselves," so, with a profession that is rarely at its best and often
at its worst, and which at its worst consists of remarkably dull young
men and remarkably dreary young women, those who want English well
taught must see to it that they provide a series of books and
instructors that will teach by themselves, whatever the teacher does to
prevent them.

Surely this enterprise of text-books and teachers, of standard
phonographs and cheaply published classics, is no fantastic impossible
dream! So far as money goes--if only money were the one thing needful--
a hundred thousand pounds would be a sufficient fund from first to last
for all of it. Yet modest as its proportions are, its consequences,
were it done by able men throwing their hearts into it, might be of
incalculable greatness. By such expedients and efforts as these we
might enormously forward the establishment of that foundation of a
world-wide spacious language, the foundation upon which there will
arise for our children subtler understandings, ampler imaginations,
sounder judgments and clearer resolutions, and all that makes at last a
nobler world of men.