§ 1
The newborn child is at first no more than an animal. Indeed, it is
among the lowest and most helpless of all animals, a mere vegetative
lump; assimilation incarnate--wailing. It is for the first day in its
life deaf, it squints blindly at the world, its limbs are beyond its
control, its hands clutch drowningly at anything whatever that drifts
upon this vast sea of being into which it has plunged so amazingly. And
imperceptibly, subtly, so subtly that never at any time can we mark with
certainty the increment of its coming, there creeps into this soft and
claimant little creature a mind, a will, a personality, the beginning of
all that is real and spiritual in man. In a little while there are eyes
full of interest and clutching hands full of purpose, smiles and frowns,
the babbling beginning of expression and affections and aversions.
Before the first year is out there is obedience and rebellion, choice
and self-control, speech has commenced, and the struggle of the newcomer
to stand on his feet in this world of men. The process is unanalyzable;
given a certain measure of care and protection, these things come
spontaneously; with the merest rough encouragement of things and voices
about the child, they are evoked.
But every day the inherent impulse makes a larger demand upon the
surroundings of the child, if it is to do its best and fullest.
Obviously, quite apart from physical consequences, the environment of
a little child may be good or bad, better or worse for it in a thousand
different ways. It may be distracting or over-stimulating, it may evoke
and increase fear, it may be drab and dull and depressing, it may be
stupefying, it may be misleading and productive of vicious habits
of mind. And our business is to find just what is the best possible
environment, the one that will give the soundest and fullest growth, not
only of body but of intelligence.
Now from the very earliest phase the infant stands in need of a
succession of interesting things. At first these are mere vague sense
impressions, but in a month or so there is a distinct looking at
objects; presently follows reaching and clutching, and soon the
little creature is urgent for fresh things to see, handle, hear, fresh
experiences of all sorts, fresh combinations of things already known.
The newborn mind is soon as hungry as the body. And if a healthy wellfed
child cries, it is probably by reason of this unsatisfied hunger,
it lacks an interest, it is bored, that dismal vacant suffering that
punishes the failure of living things to live fully and completely.
As Mr. Charles Booth has pointed out in his _Life and Labour of the
People_, it is probable that in this respect the children of the
relatively poor are least at a disadvantage. The very poor infant
passes its life in the family room, there is a going and coming, and
interesting activity of domestic work on the part of its mother, the
preparation of meals, the intermittent presence of the father, the whole
gamut of its mother’s unsophisticated temper. It is carried into crowded
and eventful streets at all hours. It participates in pothouse soirées
and assists at the business of shopping. It may not lead a very hygienic
life, but it does not lead a dull one. Contrast with its lot that of
the lonely child of some woman of fashion, leading its beautifully
non-bacterial life in a carefully secluded nursery under the control of
a virtuous, punctual, invariable, conscientious rather than emotional
nurse. The poor little soul wails as often for events as the slum baby
does for nourishment. Into its grey nursery there rushes every day,
or every other day, a breathless, preoccupied, excessively dressed,
cleverish, many-sided, fundamentally silly, and universally incapable
woman, vociferates a little conventional affection, slaps a kiss or so
upon her offspring, and goes off again to collect that daily meed of
admiration and cheap envy which is the gusto of her world. After that
gushing, rustling, incomprehensible passage, the child relapses into the
boring care of its bored hireling for another day. The nurse writes her
letters, mends her clothes, reads and thinks of the natural interests of
her own life, and the child is “good” just in proportion to the extent
to which it doesn’t “worry.”
That, of course, is an extreme case. It assumes a particularly bad
mother and a particularly ill-chosen nurse, and what is probably only
a transitory phase of sexual debasement. The average nurse of the
upper-class child is often a woman of highly developed motherly
instincts, and it is probable that our upper class and our upper
middle-class is passing or has already passed through that phase of
thought which has made solitary children so common in the last decade
or so. The effective contrast must not take us too far. We must remember
that all women do not possess the passion for nursing, and that some of
those who are defective in this direction may be, for all that, women
of exceptional gifts and capacity, and fully capable of offspring.
Civilization is based on the organized subdivision of labour, and, as
the able lady who writes as “L’amie Inconnue” in the _County Gentleman_
has pointed out in a very helpful criticism of the original version
of this paper, it is as absurd to require every woman to be a nursery
mother as it is, to require every man to till the soil. We move from
homogeneous to heterogeneous conditions, and we must beware of every
generalization we make.
For all that, one is inclined to think the ideal average environment
should contain the almost constant presence of the mother, for no one
is so likely to be continuously various and interesting and untiring as
she, and only as an exception, for exceptional mothers and nurses, can
we admit the mother-substitute. When we admit her we admit other
things. It is entirely on account of such an ideal environment, we
must remember, that monogamy finds its practical sanction; it claims to
ensure the presiding mother the maximum of security and self-respect. A
woman who enjoys the full rights of a wife to maintenance and exclusive
attention, without a complete discharge of the duties of motherhood,
profits by the imputation of things she has failed to perform. She may
be justified by other things, by an effectual co-operation with her
husband in joint labours for example, but she has altered her footing
none the less. To secure an ideal environment for children in as many
cases as possible is the second of the two great practical ends--the
first being sound births, for which the restrictions of sexual morality
exist. In addition there is the third almost equally important matter
of adult efficiency; we have to adjust affairs, if we can, to secure
the maximum of health, sane happiness and vigorous mental and physical
activity, and to abolish, as far as possible, passionate broodings,
over-stimulated appetites, disease, and destructive indulgence. Apart
from these aspects, sexual morality is outside the scope of the New
Republican altogether. . . . Do not let this passage be misunderstood.
I do not mean that a New Republican ignores sexual morality except on
these grounds, but so far as his New Republicanism goes he does, just
as a member of the Aeronautical Society, so far as his aeronautical
interests go, or as an ecclesiastical architect, so far as his
architecture goes.
The ideal environment should, without any doubt at all, centre about
a nursery--a clean, airy, brightly lit, brilliantly adorned room, into
which there should be a frequent coming and going of things and people;
but from the time the child begins to recognize objects and individuals
it should be taken for little spells into other rooms and different
surroundings. In the homely, convenient, servantless abode over which
the able-bodied, capable, skilful, civilized women of the ordinary sort
will preside in the future, the child will naturally follow its mother’s
morning activities from room to room. Its mother will talk to it, chance
visitors will sign to it. There should be a public or private garden
available where its perambulator could stand in fine weather; and its
promenades should not be too much a matter of routine. To go along a
road with some traffic is better for a child than to go along a secluded
path between hedges; a street corner is better than a laurel plantation
as a pitch for perambulators.
When a child is five or six months old it will have got a certain use
and grip with its hands, and it will want to handle and examine and test
the properties of as many objects as it can. Gifts begin. There seems
scope for a wiser selection in these early gifts. At present it is
chiefly woolly animals with bells inside them, woolly balls, and so
forth, that reach the baby’s hands. There is no reason at all why a
child’s attention should be so predominantly fixed on wool. These toys
are coloured very tastefully, but as Preyer has advanced strong reasons
for supposing that the child’s discrimination of colours is extremely
rudimentary until the second year has begun, these tasteful arrangements
are simply an appeal to the parent. Light, dark, yellow, perhaps red
and “other colours” seem to constitute the colour system of a very
young infant. It is to the parent, too, that the humorous and realistic
quality of the animal forms appeal. The parent does the shopping and has
to be amused. The parent who ought to have a doll instead of a child is
sufficiently abundant in our world to dominate the shops, and there is a
vast traffic in facetious baby toys, facetious nursery furniture, “art”
cushions and “quaint” baby clothing, all amazingly delightful things for
grown-up people. These things are bought and grouped about the child,
the child is taught tricks to complete the picture, and parentage
becomes a very amusing afternoon employment. So long as convenience
is not sacrificed to the æsthetic needs of the nursery, and so long as
common may compete with “art” toys, there is no great harm done, but it
is well to understand how irrelevant these things are to the real needs
of a child’s development.
A child of a year or less has neither knowledge nor imagination to see
the point of these animal resemblances--much less to appreciate either
quaintness or prettiness. That comes only in the second year. He is much
more interested in the crumpling and tearing of paper, in the crumpling
of chintz, and in the taking off and replacing of the lid of a little
box. I think it would be possible to devise a much more entertaining
set of toys for an infant than is at present procurable, but, unhappily,
they would not appeal to the intelligence of the average parent. There
would be, for example, one or two little boxes of different shapes and
substances, with lids to take off and on, one or two rubber things that
would bend and twist about and admit of chewing, a ball and a box
made of china, a fluffy, flexible thing like a rabbit’s tail, with the
vertebræ replaced by cane, a velvet-covered ball, a powder puff, and so
on. They could all be plainly and vividly coloured with some non-soluble
inodorous colour. They would be about on the cot and on the rug where
the child was put to kick and crawl. They would have to be too large to
swallow, and they would all get pulled and mauled about until they were
more or less destroyed. Some would probably survive for many years as
precious treasures, as beloved objects, as powers and symbols in the
mysterious secret fetichism of childhood--confidants and sympathetic
friends.
§ 2
While the child is engaged with its first toys, and with the collection
of rudimentary sense impressions, it is also developing a remarkable
variety of noises and babblements from which it will presently
disentangle speech. Day by day it will show a stronger and stronger bias
to associate definite sounds with definite objects and ideas, a bias so
comparatively powerful in the mind of man as to distinguish him from
all other living creatures. Other creatures may think, may, in a sort
of concrete way, come almost indefinably near reason (as Professor Lloyd
Morgan in his very delightful _Animal Life and Intelligence_ has shown);
but man alone has in speech the apparatus, the possibility, at any rate,
of being a reasoning and reasonable creature. It is, of course, not
his only apparatus. Men may think out things with drawings, with little
models, with signs and symbols upon paper, but speech is the common way,
the high road, the current coin of thought.
With speech humanity begins. With the dawn of speech the child ceases to
be an animal we cherish, and crosses the boundary into distinctly
human intercourse. There begins in its mind the development of the most
wonderful of all conceivable apparatus, a subtle and intricate keyboard,
that will end at last with thirty or forty or fifty thousand keys. This
queer, staring, soft little being in its mother’s arms is organizing
something within itself, beside which the most wonderful orchestra one
can imagine is a lump of rude clumsiness. There will come a time when,
at the merest touch upon those keys, image will follow image and emotion
develop into emotion, when the whole creation, the deeps of space,
the minutest beauties of the microscope, cities, armies, passions,
splendours, sorrows, will leap out of darkness into the conscious being
of thought, when this interwoven net of brief, small sounds will form
the centre of a web that will hold together in its threads the universe,
the All, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, real and
imagined, of a human mind. And if we are to make the best of a child, it
is in no way secondary to its physical health and growth that it should
acquire a great and thorough command over speech, not merely that it
should speak, but, what is far more vital, that it should understand
swiftly and subtly things written and said. Indeed, this is more than
any physical need. The body is the substance and the implement; the
mind, built and compact of language, is the man. All that has gone
before, all that we have discussed of sound birth and physical growth
and care, is no more than the making ready of the soil for the mind that
is to grow therein. As we come to this matter of language, we come a
step nearer to the intimate realities of our subject--we come to the
mental plant that is to bear the flower and the ripe fruit of the
individual life. The next phase of our inquiry, therefore, is to examine
how we can get this mental plant, this foundation substance, this
abundant mastered language best developed in the individual, and how far
we may go to ensure this best development for all children born into the
world.
From the ninth month onward the child begins serious attempts to talk.
In order that it may learn to do this as easily as possible, it requires
to be surrounded by people speaking one language, and speaking it with
a uniform accent. Those who are most in the child’s hearing
should endeavour to speak--even when they are not addressing the
child--deliberately and clearly. All authorities are agreed upon
the mischievous effect of what is called “baby talk,” the use of an
extensive sham vocabulary, a sort of deciduous milk vocabulary that will
presently have to be shed again. Froebel and Preyer join hands on
this. The child’s funny little perversions of speech are really genuine
attempts to say the right word, and we simply cause trouble and hamper
development if we give back to the seeking mind its own blunders again.
When a child wants to indicate milk, it wants to say milk, and not
“mooka” or “mik,” and when it wants to indicate bed, the needed word is
not “bedder” or “bye-bye,” but “bed.” But we give the little thing no
chance to get on in this way until suddenly one day we discover it
is “time the child spoke plainly.” Preyer has pointed out very
instructively the way in which the quite sufficiently difficult matter
of the use of I, mine, me, my, you, yours, and your is made still more
difficult by those about the child adopting irregularly the experimental
idioms it produces. When a child says to its mother, “Me go mome,” it
is doing its best to speak English, and its remark should be received
without worrying comment; but when a mother says to her child, “Me go
mome,” she is simply wasting an opportunity of teaching her child its
mother-tongue. One sympathizes with her all too readily, one understands
the sweetness to her of these soft, infantile mispronunciations; but,
indeed, she ought to understand; it is her primary business to know
better than her feelings in this affair.
In learning to speak, the children of the more prosperous classes are
probably at a considerable advantage when compared with their poorer
fellow children. They hear a clearer and more uniform intonation than
the blurred, uncertain speech of our commonalty, that has resulted from
the reaction of the great synthetic process, of the past century upon
dialects. But this natural advantage of the richer child is discounted
in one of two ways: in the first place by the mother, in the second by
the nurse. The mother in the more prosperous classes is often much more
vain and trivial than the lower-class woman; she looks to her children
for amusement, and makes them contributors to her “effect,” and, by
taking up their quaint and pretty mispronunciations, and devising
humorous additions to their natural baby talk, she teaches them to be
much greater babies than they could ever possibly be themselves. They
specialise as charming babies until their mother tires of the pose, and
then they are thrust back into the nursery to recover leeway, if they
can, under the care of governess or nurse.
The second disadvantage of the upper-class child is the foreign nurse
or nursery governess. There is a widely diffused idea that a child is
particularly apt to master and retain languages, and people try and
inoculate with French and German as Lord Herbert of Cherbury would have
inoculated children with antidotes, for all the ills their flesh was
heir to--even, poor little wretches, to an anticipatory _regimen_ for
gout. The root error of these attempts to form infantile polyglots
is embodied in an unverified quotation from Byron’s _Beppo,_ dear to
pedagogic writers--
“Wax to receive and marble to retain”
runs the line--which the curious may discover to be a description of
the faithful lover, though it has become as firmly associated with the
child-mind as has Sterne’s “tempering the wind to the shorn lamb” with
Holy Writ. And this idea of infantile receptivity and retentiveness is
held by an unthinking world, in spite of the universally accessible fact
that hardly one of us can remember anything that happened before the age
of five, and very little that happened before seven or eight, and that
children of five or six, removed into foreign surroundings, will in a
year or so--if special measures are not taken--reconstruct their idiom,
and absolutely forget every word of their mother-tongue. This foreign
nurse comes into the child’s world, bringing with her quite weird
errors in the quantities, the accent and idiom of the mother-tongue, and
greatly increasing the difficulty and delay on the road to thought and
speech. And this attempt to acquire a foreign language prematurely at
the expense of the mother-tongue, to pick it up cheaply by making the
nurse an informal teacher of languages, entirely ignores a fact upon
which I would lay the utmost stress in this paper--which, indeed, is
the gist of this paper--that only a very small minority of English or
American people have more than half mastered the splendid heritage of
their native speech. To this neglected and most significant limitation
the amount of public attention given at present is quite surprisingly
small. [Footnote: My friend, Mr. L. Cope Cornford, writes _apropos_
of this, and I think I cannot do better than print what he says as
a corrective to my own assertions: “All you say on the importance of
letting a child hear good English cleanly accented is admirable; but
we think you have perhaps overlooked the importance of ear-training
as such, which should begin by the time the child can utter its first
attempts at speech. By ear-training I mean the differentiation of
sounds--articulate, inarticulate, and musical--fixing the child’s
attention and causing it to _imitate_. As every sound requires a
particular movement of the vocal apparatus, the child will soon be able
to adapt its apparatus unconsciously and to distinguish accurately. And
if it does not so learn before the age of five or six, it probably will
never do so. By the age of two--or less--the child should be able to
_imitate_ exactly any speech-sound. Our youngsters can do so; and,
consequently, the fact that they had a nurse with a Sussex accent ceased
to matter, because they learned to distinguish her talk from correct
English. So in the case of a foreign nurse; the result of a foreigner’s
influence would be good in this way, that it would train a child to a
_new series of speech-sounds_, thus enlarging its ear capacity. Nor need
it necessarily adopt these speech-sounds as those which it should use;
it merely knows them; and if the foreigner have a good accent, and
speaks her own tongue well, the child’s ear is trained for life,
_irrespective of expression_. Experience shows that a child can keep
separate in its mind two or three languages--at first the speech-sounds,
later the expression. _Modes of expression_ need not begin till after
five, or later. With regard to music, every child should begin to
undergo a simple course of ear-training on the sol-fa system as
elaborated and taught by McNaught, because the faculty of so learning
is lost--atrophied--by the age of twelve or fourteen. But, beginning
early--as early as possible--every child, ‘musical’ or not, can be
trained, just as every child, ‘artistic’ or not, may be taught to draw
accurately up to a certain point.”]
There can be little or no dispute that the English language in its
completeness presents a range too ample and appliances too subtle for
the needs of the great majority of those who profess to speak it. I do
not refer to the half-civilized and altogether barbaric races who are
coming under its sway, but to the people we are breeding of our own
race--the barbarians of our streets, our suburban “white niggers,” with
a thousand a year and the conceit of Imperial destinies. They live
in our mother-tongue as some half-civilized invaders might live in a
gigantic and splendidly equipped palace. They misuse this, they waste
that, they leave whole corridors and wings unexplored, to fall into
disuse and decay. I doubt if the ordinary member of the prosperous
classes in England has much more than a third of the English language
in use, and more than a half in knowledge, and as we go down the social
scale we may come at last to strata having but a tenth part of our full
vocabulary, and much of that blurred and vaguely understood. The speech
of the Colonist is even poorer than the speech of the home-staying
English. In America, just as in Great Britain and her Colonies, there is
the same limitation and the same disuse. Partly, of course, this is due
to the pettiness of our thought and experience, and so far it can only
be remedied by a general intellectual amplification; but partly it is
due to the general ignorance of English prevailing throughout the world.
It is atrociously taught, and taught by ignorant men. It is atrociously
and meanly written. So far as this second cause of sheer ignorance
goes, the gaps in knowledge are continually resulting in slang and the
addition of needless neologisms to the language. People come upon ideas
that they know no English to express, and strike out the new phrase in a
fine burst of ignorant discovery. There are Americans in particular who
are amazingly apt at this sort of thing. They take an enormous pride in
the jargon they are perpetually increasing--they boast of it, they give
exhibition performances in it, they seem to regard it as the culminating
flower of their continental Republic--as though the Old World had never
heard of shoddy. But, indeed, they are in no better case than that
unfortunate lady at Earlswood who esteems newspapers stitched with
unravelled carpet and trimmed with orange peel, the extreme of human
splendour. In truth, their pride is baseless, and this slang of theirs
no sort of distinction whatever. Let me assure them that in our heavier
way we in this island are just as busy defiling our common inheritance.
We can send a team of linguists to America who will murder and
misunderstand the language against any eleven the Americans may select.
Of course there is a natural and necessary growth and development in
a living language, a growth that no one may arrest. In appliances,
in politics, in science, in philosophical interpretation, there is a
perpetual necessity for new words, words to express new ideas and new
relationships, words free from ambiguity and encumbering associations.
But the neologisms of the street and the saloon rarely supply any
occasion of this kind. For the most part they are just the stupid
efforts of ignorant men to supply the unnecessary. And side by side
with the invention of inferior cheap substitutes for existing words
and phrases, and infinitely more serious than that invention, goes on a
perpetual misuse and distortion of those that are insufficiently known.
These are processes not of growth but of decay--they distort, they
render obsolete, and they destroy. The obsolescence and destruction of
words and phrases cuts us off from the nobility of our past, from the
severed masses of our race overseas, far more effectually than any
growth of neologisms. A language may grow--our language must grow--it
may be clarified and refined and strengthened, but it need not suffer
the fate of an algal filament, and pass constantly into rottenness and
decay whenever growth is no longer in progress. That has been the
fate of languages in the past because of the feebler organization, the
slenderer, slower intercommunication, and, above all, the insufficient
records of human communities; but the time has come now--or, at the
worst, is rapidly coming--when this will cease to be a fated thing.
We may have a far more copious and varied tongue than had Addison or
Spenser--that is no disaster--but there is no reason why we should not
keep fast hold of all they had. There is no reason why the whole fine
tongue of Elizabethan England should not be at our disposal still.
Conceivably Addison would find the rich, allusive English of George
Meredith obscure; conceivably we might find a thousand words and phrases
of the year 2000 strange and perplexing; but there is no reason why a
time should ever come when what has been written well in English since
Elizabethan days should no longer be understandable and fine.
The prevailing ignorance of English in the English-speaking communities,
enormously hampers the development of the racial consciousness. Except
for those who wish to bawl the crudest thoughts, there is no means of
reaching the whole mass of these communities to-day. So far as material
requirements go it would be possible to fling a thought broadcast like
seed over the whole world to-day, it would be possible to get a book
into the hands of half the adults of our race. But at the hands and
eyes one stops--there is a gap in the brains. Only thoughts that can be
expressed in the meanest commonplaces will ever reach the minds of the
majority of the English-speaking peoples under present conditions.
A writer who aims to be widely read to-day must perpetually halt, must
perpetually hesitate at the words that arise in his mind; he must ask
himself how many people will stick at this word altogether or miss the
meaning it should carry; he must ransack his memory for a commonplace
periphrase, an ingenious rearrangement of the familiar; he must omit
or overaccentuate at every turn. Such simple and necessary words as
“obsolescent,” “deliquescent,” “segregation,” for example, must be
abandoned by the man who would write down to the general reader; he must
use “impertinent” as if it were a synonym for “impudent” and “indecent”
as the equivalent of “obscene.” And in the face of this wide ignorance
of English, seeing how few people can either read or write English
with any subtlety, and how disastrously this reacts upon the general
development of thought and understanding amidst the English-speaking
peoples, it would be preposterous even if the attempt were successful,
to complicate the first linguistic struggles of the infant with the
beginnings of a second language. But people deal thus lightly with the
mother-tongue because they know so little of it that they do not even
suspect their own ignorance of its burthen and its powers. They speak a
little set of ready-made phrases, they write it scarcely at all, and all
they read is the weak and shallow prose of popular fiction and the daily
press. That is knowing a language within the meaning of their minds, and
such a knowledge a child may very well be left to “pick up” as it may.
Side by side with this they will presently set themselves to erect a
similar “knowledge” of two or three other languages. One is constantly
meeting not only women but men who will solemnly profess to “know”
English and Latin, French, German and Italian, perhaps Greek, who are in
fact--beyond the limited range of food, clothing, shelter, trade, crude
nationalism, social conventions and personal vanity--no better than the
deaf and dumb. In spite of the fact that they will sit with books in
their hands, visibly reading, turning pages, pencilling comments, in
spite of the fact that they will discuss authors and repeat criticisms,
it is as hopeless to express new thoughts to them as it would be to
seek for appreciation in the ear of a hippopotamus. Their linguistic
instruments are no more capable of contemporary thought than a tin
whistle, a xylophone, and a drum are capable of rendering the Eroica
Symphony.
In being also ignorant of itself, this wide ignorance of English
partakes of all that is most hopeless in ignorance. Except among a few
writers and critics, there is little sense of defect in this matter.
The common man does not know that his limited vocabulary limits his
thoughts. He knows that there are “long words” and rare words in the
tongue, but he does not know that this implies the existence of definite
meanings beyond his mental range. His poor collection of everyday words,
worn-out phrases and battered tropes, constitute what he calls “plain
English,” and speech beyond these limits he seriously believes to be no
more than the back-slang of the educated class, a mere elaboration and
darkening of intercourse to secure privacy and distinction. No doubt
there is justification enough for his suspicion in the exploits of
pretentious and garrulous souls. But it is the superficial justification
of a profound and disastrous error. A gap in a man’s vocabulary is a
hole and tatter in his mind; words he has may indeed be weakly connected
or wrongly connected--one may find the whole keyboard jerry-built, for
example, in the English-speaking Baboo--but words he has not signify
ideas that he has no means of clearly apprehending, they are patches of
imperfect mental existence, factors in the total amount of his personal
failure to live.
This world-wide ignorance of English, this darkest cloud almost upon
the fair future of our confederated peoples, is something more than a
passive ignorance. It is active, it is aggressive. In England at any
rate, if one talks beyond the range of white-nigger English, one commits
a social breach. There are countless “book words” well-bred people
never use. A writer with any tenderness for half-forgotten phrases, any
disposition to sublimate the mingling of unaccustomed words, runs as
grave a risk of organized disregard as if he tampered 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
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 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 all broadly, meeting and talking
with people of diverse culture and tradition, but knows how much our
intercourse is cumbered by hesitations about quantity and accent, and
petty differences of phrase and idiom, and how greatly intonation and
accent may warp and limit our sympathy.
And while they are doing this for the general linguistic atmosphere, the
New Republicans could also attempt something to reach the children in
detail.
By instinct nearly every mother wants to teach. Some teach by instinct,
but for the most part there is a need of guidance in their teaching. At
present these first and very important phases in education are guided
almost entirely by tradition. The necessary singing and talking to very
young children is done in imitation of similar singing and talking; it
is probably done no better, it may possibly be done much worse, than
it was done two hundred years ago. A very great amount of permanent
improvement in human affairs might be secured in this direction by the
expenditure of a few thousand pounds in the systematic study of the most
educational method of dealing with children in the first two or three
years of life, and in the intelligent propagation of the knowledge
obtained. There exist already, it is true, a number of Child Study
Associations, Parents’ Unions, and the like, but for the most part these
are quite ineffectual talking societies, akin to Browning Societies,
Literary and Natural History Societies: they attain a trifling amount
of mutual improvement at their best, the members read papers to
one another, and a few medical men and schools secure a needed
advertisement. They have no organization, no concentration of their
energy, and their chief effect seems to be to present an interest in
education as if it were a harmless, pointless fad. But if a few men of
means and capacity were to organize a committee with adequate funds,
secure the services of specially endowed men for the exhaustive study of
developing speech, publish a digested report, and, with the assistance
of a good writer or so, produce very cheaply, advertise vigorously, and
disseminate widely a small, clearly printed, clearly written book of
pithy instructions for mothers and nurses in this matter of early speech
they would quite certainly effect a great improvement in the mental
foundations of the coming generation. We do not yet appreciate the fact
that for the first time in the history of the world there exists a state
of society in which almost every nurse and mother reads. It is no longer
necessary to rely wholly upon instinct and tradition, therefore, for
the early stages of a child’s instruction. We can reinforce and organize
these things through the printed word.
For example, an important factor in the early stage of speech-teaching
is the nursery rhyme. A little child, towards the end of the first year,
having accumulated a really very comprehensive selection of sounds and
noises by that time, begins to imitate first the associated motions, and
then the sounds of various nursery rhymes--“Pat-a-cake,” for example. In
the book I imagine, there would be, among many other things, a series of
little versicles, old and new, in which, to the accompaniment of simple
gestures, all the elementary sounds of the language could be easily and
agreeably made familiar to the child’s ears. [Footnote: Messrs. Heath of
Boston, U.S.A., have sent me a book of Nursery Rhymes, arranged by Mr.
Charles Welsh, which is certainly the best thing I have seen in this
way. It is worthy of note that the neglect of pedagogic study in Great
Britain is forcing the intelligent British parent and teacher to rely
more and more upon American publishers for children’s books. The work of
English writers is often very tasteful and pretty, but of the smallest
educational value. ]
And the same book I think might well contain a list of foundation things
and words and certain elementary forms of expression which the child
should become perfectly familiar with in the first three or four
years of life. Much of each little child’s vocabulary is its personal
adventure, and Heaven save us all from system in excess! But I think it
would be possible for a subtle psychologist to trace through the easy
natural tangle of the personal briar-rose of speech certain necessary
strands, that hold the whole growth together and render its later
expansion easy and swift and strong. Whatever else the child gets, it
must get these fundamental strands well and early if it is to do its
best. If they do not develop now their imperfection will cause delay
and difficulty later. There are, for example, among these fundamental
necessities, idioms to express comparison, to express position in space
and time, elementary conceptions of form and colour, of tense and mood,
the pronouns and the like. No doubt, in one way or another, most of
these forms are acquired by every child, but there is no reason why
their acquisition should not be watched with the help of a wisely framed
list, and any deficiency deliberately and carefully supplied. It would
have to be a wisely framed list, it would demand the utmost effort of
the best intelligence, and that is why something more than the tradesman
enterprise of publishers is needed in this work. The publisher’s ideal
of an author of an educational work is a clever girl in her teens
working for pocket-money. What is wanted is a little quintessential
book better and cheaper than any publisher, publishing for gain, could
possibly produce, a book so good that imitation would be difficult, and
so cheap and universally sold that no imitation would be profitable.
Upon this foundation of a sound accent and a basic vocabulary must be
built the general fabric of the language. For the most part this must
be done in the school. At present in Great Britain a considerable
proportion of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses--more particularly
those in secondary and private schools--are too ill-educated to do this
properly; there is excellent reason for supposing things are very little
better in America; and, to begin with, it must be the care of every
good New Republican to bring about a better state of things in this
most lamentable profession. Until the teacher can read and write, in the
fullest sense of these words, it is idle to expect him or her to teach
the pupil to do these things. As matters are at present, the attempt is
scarcely made. In the elementary and lower secondary schools ill-chosen
reading-books are scampered through and abandoned all too soon in favour
of more pretentious “subjects,” and a certain preposterous nonsense
called English Grammar is passed through the pupil--stuff which happily
no mind can retain. Little girls and boys of twelve or thirteen, who
cannot understand, and never will understand anything but the vulgarest
English, and who will never in their lives achieve a properly punctuated
letter, are taught such mysteries as that there are eight--I believe it
is eight--sorts of nominative, and that there is (or is not) a gerundive
in English, and trained month after month and year after year to perform
the oddest operations, a non-analytical analysis, and a ritual called
parsing that must be seen to be believed. It is no good mincing the
truth about all this sort of thing. These devices are resorted to by the
school teachers of the present just as the Rules of Double and Single
Alligation and Double Rule of Three, and all the rest of that solemn
tomfoolery, were “taught” by the arithmetic teachers in the academies
of the eighteenth century, because they are utterly ignorant, and know
themselves to be utterly ignorant, of the reality of the subject, and
because, therefore, they have to humbug the parent and pass the time
by unreal inventions. The case is not a bit better in the higher grade
schools. They do not do so much of the bogus teaching of English, but
they do nothing whatever in its place.
Now it is little use to goad the members of an ill-trained, ill-treated,
ill-organized, poorly respected and much-abused [Footnote: _Peccavi._]
profession with reproaches for doing what they cannot do, or to clamour
for legislation that will give more school time or heavier subsidies to
the pretence of teaching what very few people are able to teach. We all
know how atrociously English is taught, but proclaiming that will
not mend matters a bit, it will only render matters worse by making
schoolmasters and schoolmistresses shameless and effortless, unless we
also show how well English may be taught. The sane course is to begin by
establishing the proper way to do the thing, to develop a proper method
and demonstrate what can be done by that method in a few selected
schools, to prepare and render acceptable the necessary class-books, and
then to use examination and inspector, grant in aid, training college,
lecture, book and pamphlet to spread the sound expedients. We want an
English Language Society, of affluent and vigorous people, that will
undertake this work. And one chief duty of that society will be to
devise, to arrange and select, to print handsomely, to illustrate
beautifully and to sell cheaply and vigorously _everywhere,_ a series
of reading books, and perhaps of teachers’ companions to these reading
books, that shall serve as the basis of instruction in Standard English
throughout the whole world. These books, as I conceive them, would begin
as reading primers, they would progress through a long series of subtly
graded stories, passages and extracts until they had given the complete
range of our tongue. They would be read from, recited from, quoted in
exemplification and imitated by the pupils. Such splendid matter as
Henley and Whibley’s collection of Elizabethan Prose, for example, might
well find a place toward the end of that series of books. There would
be an anthology of English lyrics, of all the best short stories in our
language, of all the best episodes. From these readers the pupil would
pass, still often reading and reciting aloud, to such a series of
masterpieces as an efficient English Language Society could force upon
every school. At present in English schools a library is an exception
rather than a rule, and your clerical head-master on public occasions
will cheerfully denounce the “trash” reading, “snippet” reading
habits of the age, with that defect lying like a feather on his expert
conscience. A school without an easily accessible library of at least a
thousand volumes is really scarcely a school at all--it is a dispensary
without bottles, a kitchen without a pantry. For all that, if the
inquiring New Republican find two hundred linen-covered volumes of the
_Eric, or Little by Little_ type, mean goody-goody thought dressed in
its appropriate language, stored away in some damp cupboard of his son’s
school, and accessible once a week, he may feel assured things are above
the average there. My imaginary English Language Society would make it a
fundamental duty, firstly to render that library of at least a thousand
volumes or so specially cheap and easily procurable, and secondly, by
pamphlets and agitation, to render it a compulsory minimum requirement
for every grade of school. It is far more important, and it would be
far less costly even as things are, than the cheapest sort of chemical
laboratory a school could have, and it should cost scarcely more than a
school piano.
I know very little of the practical teaching of English, my own very
fragmentary knowledge of the more familiar clichés of our tongue was
acquired in a haphazard fashion, but I am inclined to think that in
addition to much reading aloud and recitation from memory the work of
instruction might consist very largely of continually more extensive
efforts towards original composition. Paraphrasing is a good exercise,
provided that it does not consist in turning good and beautiful English
into bad. I do not see why it should not follow the reverse direction.
Selected passages of mean, stereotyped, garrulous or inexact prose might
very well be rewritten, under the direction of an intelligent master.
Retelling a story that has just been read and discussed, with a change
of incident perhaps, would also not be a bad sort of exercise, writing
passages in imitation of set passages and the like. Written descriptions
of things displayed to a class should also be instructive. Caught at
the right age, most little girls, and many little boys I believe,
would learn very pleasantly to write simple verse. This they should
be encouraged to read aloud. At a later stage the more settled poetic
forms, the ballade, the sonnet, the rondeau, for example, should afford
a good practice in handling language. Pupils should be encouraged to
import fresh words into their work--even if the effect is a little
startling at times--they should hunt the dictionary for material. A good
book for the upper forms in schools dealing in a really intelligent and
instructive way with Latin and Greek, so far as it is necessary to know
these languages in order to use and manipulate technical English freely,
would, I conceive, be of very great service. It must be a good exercise
to write precise definitions of words. Logic also is an integral portion
of the study of the mother-tongue.
But to throw out suggestions in this way is an easy task. The
educational papers are full of this sort of thing, educational
conferences resound with it. What the world is not full of is the
capacity to organize these things, to drag them, struggling and clinging
to a thousand unanticipated difficulties, from the region of 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.
But in this discussion of school libraries and the like, we wander a
little from our immediate topic of mental beginnings.
§ 3
At the end of the fifth year, as the natural outcome of its instinctive
effort to experiment and learn, acting amidst wisely ordered
surroundings, the little child should have acquired a certain definite
foundation for the educational structure. It should have a vast variety
of perceptions stored in its mind, and a vocabulary of three or four
thousand words, and among these, and holding them together, there should
be certain structural and cardinal ideas. They are ideas that will have
been gradually and imperceptibly instilled, and they are necessary as
the basis of a sound mental existence. There must be, to begin with,
a developing sense and feeling for truth and for duty as something
distinct and occasionally conflicting with immediate impulse and desire,
and there must be certain clear intellectual elements established
already almost impregnably in the mind, certain primary distinctions
and classifications. Many children are called stupid, and begin their
educational career with needless difficulty through an unsoundness
of these fundamental intellectual elements, an unsoundness in no
way inherent, but the result of accident and neglect. And a starting
handicap of this sort may go on increasing right through the whole life.
The child at five, unless it is colour blind, should know the range
of colours by name, and distinguish them easily, blue and green not
excepted; it should be able to distinguish pink from pale red and
crimson from scarlet. [Footnote: There could be a set of colour bands in
the book that the English Language Society might publish.] Many children
through the neglect of those about them do not distinguish these colours
until a very much later age. I think also--in spite of the fact that
many adults go vague and ignorant on these points--that a child of five
may have been taught to distinguish between a square, a circle, an oval,
a triangle and an oblong, and to use these words. It is easier to keep
hold of ideas with words than without them, and none of these words
should be impossible by five. The child should also know familiarly by
means of toys, wood blocks and so on, many elementary solid forms. It
is matter of regret that in common language we have no easy, convenient
words for many of these forms, and instead of being learnt easily and
naturally in play, they are left undistinguished, and have to be studied
later under circumstances of forbidding technicality. It would be
quite easy to teach the child in an incidental way to distinguish cube,
cylinder, cone, sphere (or ball), prolate spheroid (which might be
called “egg”), oblate spheroid (which might be called “squatty ball”),
the pyramid, and various parallelepipeds, as, for example, the square
slab, the oblong slab, the brick, and post. He could have these things
added to his box of bricks by degrees, he would build with them and
combine them and play with them over and over again, and absorb an
intimate knowledge of their properties, just at the age when such
knowledge is almost instinctively sought and is most pleasant and easy
in its acquisition. These things need not be specially forced upon
him. In no way should he be led to emphasize them or give a priggish
importance to his knowledge of them. They will come into his toys and
play mingled with a thousand other interests, the fortifying powder of
clear general ideas, amidst the jam of play.
In addition the child should be able to count, [Footnote: There can be
little doubt that many of us were taught to count very badly, and that
we were hampered in our arithmetic throughout life by this defect.
Counting should be taught be means of small cubes, which the child can
arrange and rearrange in groups. It should have at least over a hundred
of these cubes--if possible a thousand; they will be useful as toy
bricks, and for innumerable purposes. Our civilization is now wedded
to a decimal system of counting, and, to begin with, it will be well to
teach the child to count up to ten and to stop there for a time. It is
suggested by Mrs. Mary Everest Boole that it is very confusing to have
distinctive names for eleven and twelve, which the child is apt to class
with the single numbers and contrast with the teens, and she proposes
at the beginning (_The Cultivation of the Mathematical Imagination_,
Colchester: Benham & Co.) to use the words “one-ten,” “two-ten,”
thirteen, fourteen, etc., for the second decade in counting. Her
proposal is entirely in harmony with the general drift of the admirably
suggestive diagrams of number order collected by Mr. Francis
Gallon. Diagram after diagram displays the same hitch at twelve, the
predominance in the mind of an individualized series over quantitatively
equal spaces until the twenties are attained. Many diagrams also display
the mental scar of the clock face, the early counting is overmuch
associated with a dial. One might perhaps head off the establishment
of that image, and supply a more serviceable foundation for memories
by equipping the nursery with a vertical scale of numbers divided into
equal parts up to two or three hundred, with each decade tinted. When
the child has learnt to count up to a hundred with cubes, it should be
given an abacus, and it should also be encouraged to count and check
quantities with all sorts of things, marbles, apples, bricks in a wall,
pebbles, spots on dominoes, and so on; taught to play guessing games
with marbles in a hand, and the like. The abacus, the hundred square
and the thousand cube, will then in all probability become its cardinal
numerical memories. Playing cards (without corner indices) and dominoes
supply good recognizable arrangements of numbers, and train a child to
grasp a number at a glance. The child should not be taught the Arabic
numerals until it has counted for a year or more. Experience speaks
here. I know one case only too well of a man who learnt his Arabic
numerals prematurely, before he had acquired any sound experimental
knowledge of numerical quantity, and, as a consequence, his numerical
ideas are incurably associated with the peculiarities of the figures.
When he hears the word seven he does not really think of seven or
seven-ness at all, even now, he thinks of a number rather like four
and very unlike six. Then again, six and nine are mysteriously and
unreasonably linked in his mind, and so are three and five. He confuses
numbers like sixty-three and sixty-five, and finds it hard to keep
seventy-four distinct from forty-seven. Consequently, when it came
to the multiplication table, he learnt each table as an arbitrary
arrangement of relationships, and with an extraordinary amount of
needless labour and punishment. But obviously with cubes or abacus
at hand, it would be the easiest thing in the world for a child to
construct and learn its own multiplication table whenever the need
arose.] it should be capable of some mental and experimental arithmetic,
and I am told that a child of five should be able to give the _sol-fa_
names to notes, and sing these names at their proper pitch. Possibly in
social intercourse the child will have picked up names for some of the
letters of the alphabet, but there is no great hurry for that before
five certainly, or even later. There is still a vast amount of things
immediately about the child that need to be thoroughly learnt, and
a premature attack on letters divides attention from these more
appropriate and educational objects. It should, for the reason given
in the footnote, be still ignorant of the Arabic numerals. It should
be able to handle a pencil and amuse itself with freehand of this
sort:--and its mind should be quite uncontaminated by that imbecile
drawing upon squared paper by means of which ignorant teachers destroy
both the desire and the capacity to sketch in so many little children.
Such sketching could be enormously benefited by a really intelligent
teacher who would watch the child’s efforts, and draw with the child
just a little above its level. For example, the teacher might stimulate
effort by rejoining to such a sketch as the above, something in this
vein:--
The child will already be a great student of picture-books at five,
something of a critic (after the manner of the realistic school), and
it will be easy to egg it almost imperceptibly to a level where copying
from simple outline illustrations will become possible. About five, a
present of some one of the plastic substitutes for modelling clay
now sold by educational dealers, _plasticine_ for example, will be a
discreet and acceptable present to the child--if not to its nurse.
The child’s imagination will also be awake and active at five. He will
look out on the world with anthropomorphic (or rather with pædomorphic)
eyes. He will be living on a great flat earth--unless some officious
person has tried to muddle his wits by telling him the earth is round;
amidst trees, animals, men, houses, engines, utensils, that are all
capable of being good or naughty, all fond of nice things and hostile to
nasty ones, all thumpable and perishable, and all conceivably esurient.
And the child should know of Fairy Land. The beautiful fancy of the
“Little People,” even if you do not give it to him, he will very
probably get for himself; they will lurk always just out of reach of
his desiring curious eyes, amidst the grass and flowers and behind the
wainscot and in the shadows of the bedroom. He will come upon their
traces; they will do him little kindnesses. Their affairs should
interweave with the affairs of the child’s dolls and brick castles
and toy furniture. At first the child will scarcely be in a world of
sustained stories, but very eager for anecdotes and simple short tales.
This is the hopeful foundation upon which at or about the fifth year the
formal education of every child in a really civilized community ought to
begin. [Footnote: One may note here, perhaps, the desirability too often
disregarded by over-solicitous parents, and particularly by the parents
of the solitary children who are now so common, of keeping the child a
little out of focus, letting it play by itself whenever it will, never
calling attention to it in a manner that awakens it to the fact of an
audience, never talking about it in its presence. Solitary children
commonly get too much control, they are forced and beguiled upward
rather than allowed to grow, their egotism is over-stimulated, and they
miss many of the benefits of play and competition. It seems a pity, too,
in the case of so many well-to-do people, that having equipped nurseries
they should not put them to a fuller use--if in no other way than by
admitting foster children. None of this has been very fully analyzed, of
course (there are enormous areas of valuable research in these matters
waiting for people of intelligence and leisure, or of intelligence and
means), but the opinion that solitary children are handicapped by their
loneliness is very strong. It is nearly certain that as a rule they make
less agreeable boys and girls, but to me at any rate it is not nearly so
certain that they make adult failures. It would be interesting to learn
just what proportion of solitary children there is on the roll of
those who have become great in our world. One thinks of John Ruskin,
a particularly fine specimen of the highly focussed single son. Prig
perhaps he was, but this world has a certain need of such prigs.
A correspondent (a schoolmistress of experience) who has collected
statistics in her own neighbourhood, is strongly of opinion not only
that solitary children are below the average, but that all elder
children are inferior in quality. I do not believe this, but it would
be interesting and valuable if some one could find time for a wide and
thorough investigation of this question.]