e shall do all for the best; we can give happiness; we can
communicate wisdom; relation is established; the perplexing gulf of
silence is bridged. The baby speaks!

But it is not of the baby's learning to speak that we propose to write
here. All babies learn to speak; or, if they do not, we know that it means
a terrible visitation,--a calamity rare, thank God! but bitter almost
beyond parents' strength to bear.

But why, having once learned to speak, does the baby leave off speaking
when it becomes a man or a woman? Many of our men and women to-day need,
almost as much as when they were twenty-four months old, to learn to
speak. We do not mean learning to speak in public. We do not mean even
learning to speak well,--to pronounce words clearly and accurately; though
there is need enough of that in this land! But that is not the need at
which we are aiming now. We mean something so much simpler, so much
further back, that we hardly know how to say it in words which shall be
simple enough and also sufficiently strong. We mean learning to speak at
all! In spite of all which satirical writers have said and say of the
loquacious egotism, the questioning curiosity of our people, it is true
to-day that the average American is a reticent, taciturn, speechless
creature, who, for his own sake, and still more for the sake of all who
love him, needs, more than he needs any thing else under heaven, to learn
to speak.

Look at our silent railway and horse-cars, steamboat-cabins, hotel-tables,
in short, all our public places where people are thrown together
incidentally, and where good-will and the habit of speaking combined would
create an atmosphere of human vitality, quite unlike what we see now. But
it is not of so much consequence, after all, whether people speak in these
public places or not. If they did, one very unpleasant phase of our
national life would be greatly changed for the better. But it is in our
homes that this speechlessness tells most fearfully,--on the breakfast and
dinner and tea-tables, at which a silent father and mother sit down in
haste and gloom to feed their depressed children. This is especially true
of men and women in the rural districts. They are tired; they have more
work to do in a year than it is easy to do. Their lives are
monotonous,--too much so for the best health of either mind or body. If
they dreamed how much this monotony could be broken and cheered by the
constant habit of talking with eac