miles of loaded lighters were anchored along the channel, and great steamers were moored to the quay several ranks deep, all receiving their loads of grain. Thousands of men of every nationality and in motley dress were swarming like bees all over the cargo boats, carrying sacks of grain from the army of carts on the shore and pouring it into the open hatches. The English flag fluttered from many a mast, the names of familiar ports could be read on almost every great rounded stern, and the English language distinctly reached our ears in the babel of several other tongues. We had paddled a long forty miles against a heavy wind and sea, and preferring the quiet of camp to the confusion of the busy town, landed on an unoccupied meadow in full view of Braila, extending far along the bluff and look

ing down upon the forest of masts on the river, and with the spires and domes of Galatz distinctly visible on a high point of land a few miles below us.

Braila is at the head of navigation for sea-going vessels, and as it is only about 125 miles from the mouth of the river, is practically a port on the Black Sea. A few years ago it was of secondary commercial importance to Galatz, a larger town similarly placed on a bluff fifteen miles further down stream. Since the Turkish war, however, the grain trade has been gradually transferred to the former city, until it has now absorbed the whole of this commerce, and has consequently

become the chief shipping port for all the produce of graingrowing re

gions of Roumania and northern Bulgaria.

The army of the Czar made the first crossing of the Danube in 1877 from Galatz, across the marsh to a spur of the bold hills near the village of Matchin, and it was in one of the narrow arms of the river here that the Turkish monitors were entrapped and destroyed. Galatz covers much more territory than its neighbor above, spreading far out over a

level plateau, along highways which are deserts of dust in summer and sloughs of mire in winter. Part of the town is laid out with some regularity, and there are a few streets well cared for and with new buildings; but the thoroughfares on the slope of the plateau near the river are narrow, crooked, and steep, and most of the pavements are simply atrocious. There is no gas manufactured, but an abundance of water is brought into the town, and a fountain is in constant operation in the tiny park, where a military band plays

light French airs every evening to a motley crowd of many nationalities. The better class of Roumanians admire everything French, and in all the cities there are curious and often ludicrous attempts to imitate Parisian architecture and to follow the customs of that capital. This is the result, of course, of the French education of the youth of the leading families for generations past.

The larger part of the town consists of houses only one story in height, with stucco façades and tiled roofs. In certain

quarters the population is very dense, and the streets and dwellings are there in a state of indescribable filth. The crowded market-places are, in the morning, perfect museums of types and costumes.

Alba nians in fustinellas like ballet-dancers' skirts jostle Slovac raftsmen in their skintight woollen trousers; smart marines from the naval station at the upper part of the town haggle with peddlers of Turkish tobacco; and florid-faced cooks of English steamers shoulder their way to the meat shops, regardless of Roumanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, or Jew. In the outskirts of the town several large bands of gypsies camp on the hill-sides; for here, as in most other places in Roumania and Hungary, they are not allowed to occupy houses. Of all the specimens of this remarkable race we saw in our trip, those at Galatz were by far the most savage and repulsive in appearance. we approached their squalid camp on the bare slope of a great hill, exposed to wind and sun, hundreds of half-clothed howling maniacs swooped down upon us, wildly gesticulating and shrieking for alms,

W

As

tearing open their garments to show their emaciated bodies, and holding aloft naked children shivering in the cold breeze. Raven black hair falling over their faces in tangled masses half hid their small cunning eyes, and sun and dirt had given their skins the color and texture of longtanned leather. Everything about them

clothes, blankets, and tents-was of the same suggestive brown hue, and this monotone was only relieved by gaudy trinkets in the matted tresses of the women, and by an occasional ornamental knife-handle in the girdle of the men. We were unable to endure for any length of time the filth of the camp and the proximity of the evil-looking, ill-smelling crowd, which at every moment became more and more difficult to avoid, and we soon retreated, followed for a long distance by a number of urchins, all limbs and rags, who turned somersaults in the dust and yelled frantically for money. We did not feel purified from the contact with these gypsies until we were seated again in the canoes and facing the brisk east wind on the broad reach below Galatz.

HEN the author of "The Cathedral" was accosted by the wandering Englishmen within the lofty aisles of Chartres, he cracked a joke,

"Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends,

The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed, Abolished in the truce of common speech And mutual comfort of the mother-tongue." In this common speech other Englishmen are not always ready to acknowledge the full rights of Lowell's countryman. They would put us off with but a younger brother's portion of the mother-tongue, seeming somehow to think that they are more closely related to the common parent than we are. But Orlando, the younger son of Sir Rowland du Bois, was no villain; and though we have broken with the fatherland, the mother-tongue is none the less our heritage. Indeed we need not care whether the division is per stirpes or per capita, our share is not the less in either case.

Beneath the impotent protests which certain British newspapers are prone to make every now and again against the

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 506.-28

"American language as a whole, and against the stray Americanism which has happened last to invade England, there is a tacit assumption that we Americans are outer barbarians, mere strangers, wickedly tampering with something which belongs to the British exclusively. And the outcry against the "American language" is not as shrill nor as piteous as the shriek of horror with which certain of the journals of London greet "American spelling," a hideous monster, which they feared was ready to devour them as soon as the international copyright bill should become law. In the midst of every discussion of the effect of the copyright act in Great Britain, the bugbear of "American spelling" reared its grisly head. The London Times declared that English publishers would never put any books into type in the United States because the people of England would never tolerate the peculiarities of orthography which prevailed in American printing-offices. The St. James's Gazette promptly retorted that "already newspapers in London are habitually

using the ugliest forms of American spelling, and those silly eccentricities do not make the slightest difference in their circulation." The Times and the St. James's Gazette might differ as to the effect of the copyright act on the profits of the printers of England, but they agreed heartily as to the total depravity of "American spelling." I think that any disinterested foreigner who might chance to hear these violent outcries would suppose that English orthography was as the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not; he would be justified in believing that the system of spelling now in use in Great Britain was hallowed by the Established Church and in some way mysteriously connected with the state religion. Indeed no other explanation would suffice to account for the vigor, the violence, and the persistency of the protests.

Just what the British newspapers are afraid of, it is not easy to say; and it is difficult to declare just what they mean when they talk of American spelling." Probably they do not refer to the improvements in orthography suggested by the first great American - Benjamin Franklin. Possibly they do refer to the modifications in the accepted spelling proposed by another American, Noah Webster-not so great, and yet not to be named slightingly by any one who knows how fertile his labors have been for the good of the whole country. Noah WebNoah Webster, so his biographer, Mr. Scudder, tells was one of the first to carry a spirit of democracy into letters. . . . Throughout his work one may detect a confidence in the common-sense of the people which was as firm as Franklin's." But the innovations of Webster were hesitating and often inconsistent; and the most of them have been abandoned by later editors of Webster's "American Dictionary of the English Language."

us,

against the omission of the u from such words as honour, against the substitution of an s for a c in such words as defence, and against the transposing of the final two letters of such words as theatre. The objection to "American spelling" may lie deeper than I have here suggested, and it may have a wider application; but I have done my best to state it fully and fairly as I have deduced it from a painful perusal of many columns of exacerbated British writing.

Now if I have succeeded in stating honestly the extent of the British journalistic objections to "American spelling," the unprejudiced reader may be moved to ask: "Is this all? Are these few and slight and unimportant changes the cause of this mighty commotion ?" One may agree with Sainte- Beuve in thinking that "orthography is the beginning of literature," without discovering in these modifications from the Johnsonian canon any cause for extreme disgust. And since I have quoted SainteBeuve once, I venture to cite him again, and to take from the same letter of March 15, 1867, his suggestion that "if we write more correctly, let it be to express especially honest feelings and just thoughts."

Feelings may be honest though they are violent, but irritation is not the best frame of mind for just thinking. The tenacity with which some of the newspapers of London are wont to defend the accepted British orthography is perhaps due rather to feeling than to thought. Lowell told us that æsthetic hatred burnt nowadays with as fierce a flame as ever once theological hatred; and any American who chances to note the force and the fervor and the frequency of the objurgations against "American spelling" in the columns of the Saturday Review, for example, and of the Athenæum, may find himself wondering as to the date of the papal bull which declared the infallibility of contemporary British orthography, and as to the place where the council of the Church was held at which it was made an article of faith.

The Saturday Review and the Athenæum, highly pitched as their voices are, yet are scarcely shriller in their cry to arms against the possible invasion of the sanctity of British orthography by“ American spelling" than is the London Times, the solid representative of British thought, the mighty organ-voice of British feeling.

When we read what is written in the Times and the Saturday Review and the Athenæum, sometimes in set articles on the subject, and even more often in casual and subsidiary slurs in the course of book-reviews, we wonder at the vehemence of the feeling displayed. If we did not know that ancient abuses are often defended with more vigor and with louder shouts than inheritances of less doubtful worth, we might suppose that the present spelling of the English language was in a condition perfectedly satisfactory alike to scholar and to student. Such, however, is not the case. The leading philologists of Great Britain and of the United States have repeatedly denounced English spelling as it now is on both sides of the Atlantic. Professor Max Müller at Oxford is no less emphatic than Professor Whitney at Yale. There is now living no scholar of any repute who any longer defends the orthodox and ordinary orthography of the English language.

66

The fact is that a little learning is quite as dangerous a thing now as it was in Pope's day. Those who are volubly denouncing American spelling" in the columns of British journals are not students of the history of English speech; they are not scholars in English; in so far as they know anything of the language, they are but amateur philologists. As a well-known writer on spelling reform once neatly remarked, "The men who get their etymology by inspiration are like the poor in that we have them always with us." Although few of them are as ignorant and dense as the unknown unfortunate who first tortured the obviously jocular Welsh rabbit into a pedantic and impossible Welsh rarebit, still the most of their writing serves no good purpose; to quote the apt illustration of a Western humorist, "It has as little influence as the p in pneumonia." Nor do we discover in

Any one who takes the trouble to inform himself on the subject will soon discover that it is only the half-educated man who defends the contemporary orthography of the English language, and who denounces the alleged American spelling" of center and honor. The uneducated reader may wonder perchance what the g is doing in sovereign; the half-educated reader discerns in the g a connecting link between the English sovereign and the Latin regno; the welleducated reader knows that there is no philological connection whatever between regno and sovereign.

The most of those who write with ease in British journals, deploring the prevalence of "American spelling," have never carried their education so far as to acquire that foundation of wisdom which prevents a man from expressing an opinion on subjects as to which he is ignorant. The object of education, it has been said, is to make a man know what he knows, and also to know how much he does not know. Despite the close sympathy between the intellectual pursuits, a student of optics is not qualified to express an opinion in æsthetics; and on the other hand, a critic of art may easily be ignorant of science. Now literature is one of the arts, and philology is a science. Though men of letters have to use words as the tools of their trade, orthography is none the less a branch of philology, and philology does not come by nature. Literature may even exist without writing, and therefore without spelling. Homer and the trouveres and the minnesingers practised their art without the aid of letters. Writing, indeed, has no necessary connection with literature, still less has orthography. A literary critic is rarely a scientific student of language; he has no need to be; but being ignorant, it is the part of modesty for him not to expose his ignorance. To boast of it is unseemly.

Far be it from me to appear as the defender of the "American spelling" which the British journalists denounce. This "American spelling" is less absurd than the British spelling only in so far as it has varied therefrom. Even in these variations there is abundant absurdity.