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land and America on her side.' Such remarks I have heard literally scores of times, and they undoubtedly represent the average German's views and wishes. Time will, of course, do something toward softening down these feelings; but it is an undeniable fact that many Germans of my personal acquaintance are systematically training up their children to hate France, and, above all, are teaching them that they must avenge the alleged wrongs done to German women by the French black troops in the occupied area.

Meanwhile, such is the actual hatred for France that, no matter how distinctly the Allied press proclaims that this or that decision was a joint decision of the Allies, the whole blame is invariably put upon France. Every rebuff administered to Germany is due to French cruelty and revenge. The inculcation of this spirit of hatred against France is, of course, the more easy since France is the country in whose name the Allied Missions here act, and thus the French have the perhaps not always congenial task of pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for their partners.

At the same time, the French appear hardly to have grown accustomed to their victory, and scarcely to realize that after forty-four years of shivering under the German menace, they have won for themselves a freedom which, if rightly used, will enable them to pursue, as long as one can reasonably foresee, a policy of national dignity commensurate with the position to which France is entitled by the valor, charm, industry, and intelligence of her population.

The temptation to repay all at once the many indignities from which they suffered after 1871 has been too strong for many Frenchmen. Not only

are the professional journalists too often unbridled in their remarks, but men such as M. Poincaré are losing no opportunity of keeping French feeling against Germany at white heat.

The still dangerous question of Upper Silesia is exceptionally deplorable. The French representatives on the InterAllied Mission have made virtually no pretense of impartiality, and their attitude is resented the more in that Silesia is so closely bound up with the traditions of Frederick the Great; while the Poles are not only despised by the Germans for their lack of business capacity, but are hated by them with the hatred that the oppressor always feels for his victim. Not even the loss of AlsaceLorraine could move Germany to such fierce hatred for France as the surrender of Upper Silesia to the Poles, after what would be eternally proclaimed as tampering with the results of a gerrymandered plebiscite.

The next few years are going to be critical for the future of Europe. France above all is walking to-day per ignes

Suppositos cineri doloso,

and, no less than Germany, has temporarily forgotten the wise old dictum of Bismarck, that in politics there is no room for either hatred or love. Mankind, it is to be hoped, will eventually achieve a higher level than these words connote. But to-day we are not even on that humble plane, and the superficial observer, who eats his dinner in Berlin to the strains of the latest English or American musical comedy, is making a great mistake if he thinks that the German will-to-power has been finally crushed, and that there is no longer a steady, relentless national purpose behind the cheap veneer of the neo-Teutonic republicanism.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

THE SIMPLE SPELLERS

AN anæmic youth in horn goggles has called on me in the interests of the Simple Spellers. He shamelessly appropriated to himself and his cause two good hours of my time, seeking by processes which, for want of a better name, must pass for argumentation, to enlist me in his army. I suppose someone pays him for his time. I wish someone would pay me for mine; it was the best I had, and it is gone where I cannot recover it. And the gist of his shameless argument was that simplified spelling saves time!

He seemed to be obsessed with the naïve theory that we save time if we don't spend it; whereas everyone who uses time knows that to spend it before it spends itself is the only way to save it. Accordingly I could get no real information from him as to whose time the simplification of spelling would save, or how. The idea seems to be that every time you write thru instead of through you save a second; and if you write it often enough, you might in the course of some years accumulate time enough for a vacation in Italy or an appendicitis operation. It appears to be based on the fatuous notion that time is money, and can be kept in the savings bank at compound interest till you need it. Suppose you write ten thousand simply spelled words a day, saving a second on each, or two hours and fortytwo minutes on the day's work. Then you write for two hours and forty-two minutes and save three quarters of an hour more and so on to infinity. It is subject to diminishing returns, but it goes on forever, and when you get down

to split seconds you can take a fresh start. It is a beautiful theory, but it does n't apply to me. I could never save time by writing thru; I should spend infinitely more time trying to remember to write it, and in hating it after I had written it, than I could save were it briefer than the very soul of wit.

I suppose I am an exception in that I am still old-fashioned enough to do my own writing; I am not yet incorporated and speeded up by means of multiple dictaphones and typists. If I were, I suppose I should get five cents a word no matter how they were spelled, and should be glad of simple spelling as a saving in 'overhead.' I should gloat over the thought that my stenographer, by using simple spelling (if she succeeded in learning it), would increase my profit by a hundred dollars a day. She might save time; a few of her would. But if I know anything about her, she would add it to her recreation periods, and devote it to gazing out of the window. So she will do, anyway. She will have her simple pleasures, nor need I purchase them for her at the cost of seeing my perfectly good English translated into the syncopations of Josh Billings or Ring Lardner.

But how about the children? Must their little minds be burdened with superfluous letters? or shall they be freed by an Emancipation Proclamation of the Simple Spellers? 'If it were done when 't is done, then 't were well it were done quickly.' But I do not recall any burden of superfluous letters that weighed heavily on my infant mind. My observation tells me that there are two kinds of people, those who learn to spell, and those who do not;

and neither kind worries about 'meaningless combinations of letters' - no one does that but the Simple Spellers. Indeed, I question whether learning to spell is a question of memorizing sequences of letters, any more than drawing is a matter of memorizing sequences of lines, curves, and angles. I do not believe that through is seven letters; it is a fact, like a maple leaf that I know when I see it, and with slight training I can draw it with my pencil. With pen or typewriter I make the symbol for the word by a series of reflex motions; I do not count the letters. If you ask me how I know through from though, I should probably mention the difference of the r, but the fact is I know them as I know Uncle Jim from Uncle Peter without consciousness of the distinguishing features. I know that is Uncle Jim because he looks like Uncle Jim; you need n't simplify him on my account; I never burdened my mind with details in learning him.

Spelling is not a craft by itself: it is a part of writing and reading, training of eye and hand. When a boy writes starboard martyr for Stabat Mater, or forehead for forward, he writes what he hears; the fault is not with his ear, but with his visual image of the words. It means that he is not a reader, and is not accustomed to the appearance of the words. To try to teach him the distinctions by lists of letters alone would be about as useless as to try to teach him to distinguish people he never saw by means of verbal descriptions. I doubt if the one system is really easier to learn than the other. I am still to be convinced that the burden of our present system would be sufficiently lightened by the change to compensate anyone for the burden it would certainly be on a generation or two of children to have to learn both systems; and I see no security that the change could be made with less effort.

The Simple Speller has his answer ready. The gain would be in logicality, and to become more logical in any department of life is, he is assured, worth any sacrifice. I have no such assurance. To make spelling logical would be only the first step toward making language logical. Now logic is a good tool where it fits, but it does not fit every contingency of life. It is a good thing in language up to a certain point which nobody has discovered. If it had been the ruling principle of language from the start, and if our splay-footed ancestors who first began to grunt with meaning could have looked down through the centuries and seen what they were letting us in for, language might have been logical, and we too. In that case we should probably have but one language in the world to-day, one of downright Prussian efficiency, fitted accurately to every service of life except that of imagination. Is that our ideal? If so we must change ourselves first; for if by a gesture of magic we could make our language overnight as logical as mathematics, how long would it stay so with our minds working as they do? The language of a people is like the skin of a man; as a rule, it fits snugly, and it is not often that we can better its fit by taking thought, except as by taking thought we better ourselves.

Indeed, the Simple Spellers are illadvised to seek more logic till they learn to use better what they have. The only arguments they have offered me are drawn from antecedent probability, which, if I remember my logic, is the weakest argument known, since it is built of inference before experience and buttressed with parabolic evidence. What we want to know about simplified spelling is whether it will simplify life for us and our children; what effect it would have on us as a nation; whether it is anything that would compensate us for the agony of the change. Why

not look to those who have tried it? The Germans have simplified their spelling as far as a people could, and still use the old symbols. At this time it might be impossible to get a fair answer to the question what the effect of the system has been on the nation, how much time the people have saved by it, and how they have spent it. The French understand themselves pretty well; they have a fairly sure instinct for what they can and cannot make themselves do. In the Year One of the Age of Reason, which was 1792 by dead reckoning, they rationalized by fiat everything in France except human nature and spelling. Human nature then took its course, and before long everything was back where it was before, except for a few matters chiefly political.

Even so do spelling reforms come and go, leaving few traces. You can make a formal garden by rule and compass, but eternal vigilance and labor are the price of it; if you allow yourself the least interval of relaxation, the irregularities of nature will reassert themselves. Simple spelling cannot establish itself by decree, for it has no authority. It must win its place by consent of the governed, and it has not a winning personality. So far it has not learned to smile. And if it has a scintilla of imagination, its sponsors would do well to let it show. I do not find simplified spelling useful; I know it isn't beautiful; it isn't even funny. Therefore, my word for it is that of the king to the harper:

Either ye serve me foot and hand,
Or lift my heart with glee;
Else ye have neither roof nor land,
Nor guerdon get from me.

CONVERSATIONS

When still I prefaced my name with 'Miss,' none but my intimates ever thought of engaging me in conversa

tion about the qualifications of my laundress and the amount of her weekly charge; acquaintances did not ask me if I found it well-nigh impossible to secure satisfying food at a reasonable price, and anyone would have blushed to inquire whether or not I made my own clothes. But once I had changed Miss for Mrs., the veriest strangers began to take a surprising interest in the domestic machinery of my life; commonplaces assumed astounding conversational importance. And it is not that I resent kindly inquiries about the brand of macaroni we prefer, or whether we burn soft coal or briquets, but that I deplore the passing of a time when people talked to me about interesting, impersonal things and I did not have to intrigue them into such conversation.

As I study what seems to be the circumscribed conversational opportunities of married women, I wonder: Does some mischievous fairy go to marriage feasts, and cast a spell upon the bride that robs her of all interest in, or ability for, real conversation? Or does the world only think so? Whatever the answer, there are hundreds of us who have escaped the wicked fairy's curse, escaped to protest and to plead.

I am quite sure that in both material and practice I am much better fitted for participation in worthy conversation than I was two years ago. But, unfortunately, I seem not only to have exchanged my name for that of my husband, but to have given my right to any ideas on any worth-while subjects 'to boot.' Do we have a chance caller, she settles herself with, 'Dear me, how you've changed this house! Didn't you have a great deal of trouble getting help?' Then follow the usual questions about the butcher, the grocer, the laundress, the coal.

If John passes through the hall, and I ask him to come in and greet our neighbor, her face brightens and she

cries, with genuine enthusiasm, 'Oh, Mr. B, I've been wanting to meet you! Please tell me what to give my little ten-year-old girl to read'; and, 'Do you approve of profusely illustrated books for children?' This happens to be a subject which has claimed my profound interest, and about which I have well-defined opinions; but it never occurred to the mother of the tenyear-old to ask my advice. John carefully tells her what he knows to be my conclusions in the matter; she thanks him volubly and at length leaves, hoping that I will not lose my laundress, because 'they are so hard to get in this town.'

We have a guest to tea. She compliments me on the quality of the strawberry-jam, asks if I made it myself, and if it was n't hard to get sugar, and then turns to John with, 'Mr. B-, what do you think of this new play? Is it possible, do you think, that the leading lady merits all the favorable comment she is receiving?' By chance, this gifted leading lady has been my friend for years - we have enjoyed many a pleasant dinner together; but I refrain from mentioning the fact and give my attention to John's criticisms of the play and the further questions of our guest, who presently rewards my attention by asking me if I have seen any pictures of the star and if I don't think her pretty.

When John and I first began to meet this boycott of wives in the field of conversation, we attempted to combat it. When conversation was directed to him which he felt that my experience fitted me to discuss better, he said so and passed the leadership to me. We soon discovered that the unusualness of this manœuvre so pained and surprised our guests that it made constructive conversation momentarily impossible for them. It was apparent that we must abandon our course, if we were not to suffer the charge of being

boorish hosts and uncomfortable guests. We still protest occasionally, but, as a rule, we exchange an understanding glance, and then John talks, and I assume what seems to be the inevitable rôle of a married female person - that of serene onlooker at all conversations that have not to do with household matters that any Swedish maid-of-allwork is better equipped to discuss than am I.

Unmarried women, who are themselves engaged in interesting public work, are the leaders in this unconscious shut-out of their married sisters. I know a very intelligent and talented woman whose husband is an architect. He has a studio in his home, where his wife works with him. There is not a plan he makes which has not incorporated in it some idea that was hers. Yet I have more than once seen bachelor-girl guests in their home all but exclude Mrs. M- from a spirited conversation on building art, and conclude the talk with that exasperating air which says plainly, 'If only these clever men married women who could appreciate them!'

Last summer, at my express request, John and I devoted the leisure we could find in two months to the fascinating subject of French verse. Our guest, an unmarried girl of enviable attainments, came in from the verandah one evening, where she had been in conversation with John, and said, 'It's wonderful what John has got out of his study of French poetry.'

'Yes,' I replied, 'we have enjoyed it, and I am convinced that the French idea of rhythm

I got no further. 'Oh,' said my guest in surprise, 'I knew that John had been studying the subject, but I did n't know that he had made you do it.'

I am still wondering if I was rude to her. I never can remember what I said, only what I felt. I know that we did

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