t down and simplified the
Chinese signs, giving them names of their own. In this way they manage
to write very swiftly. And, while not so clumsy as the Chinese fashion,
the Japanese method is clumsier than is the use of an alphabet. In late
years, a society has been started in Japan to do away altogether with
their old-time writing, and adopt our alphabet.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.]

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

Perhaps, by this time, you are beginning to see how very slowly
alphabets have grown, and how hard it has been for human beings to
perfect them. Knowing this, will you not look now with more interest on
written and printed words? When you see letters, will you not reflect
what a history each one has, reaching far back into the remotest past,
where at first all seems dark, and where, when light does come, the very
number and variety of materials perplex the student of alphabets?
Moreover, will you not feel ashamed of people who laugh or sneer at
savage nations who have no sound-writing, no syllabary, no alphabet? It
does not mean that in such races all men are stupid. As a rule it means
simply that the race has not had a fair chance. It has been racked by
wars. Or it has never come in contact peacefully with some nation that
used a method of writing a trifle better than its own, so that the
brighter minds could establish schools of learning. When one nation
conquers another, the higher and cleverer minds among the conquered are
often the first to be destroyed. The best of our Indians of North and
South America seem to have been the first to fall in battle with the
whites, or to have died off because of their cruelty. The reason why the
others, who lived with or near the white settlers, did not readily
borrow our way of writing in their turn, as we had borrowed from the
Romans, the Romans from the Greeks and Phoenicians, and the latter from
the Egyptians, seems to be that our system was too far advanced for
them. But if the first white settlers in Central and South America had
been kind and wise men, instead of coarse and greedy people, they could
have found tribes and nations almost as advanced in their mode of
writing as the Japanese, though not the equals of the Japanese in
architecture and the fine arts. These tribes could have learned our
alphabet if care had been taken to instruct their superior men. It is
certain that the Aztecs, or Mexican Indians, had advanced very far on
the road to a true alphabet. When th