ho
they are. I ask you to pronounce s-o-w, and you ask me what kind of a
one.

If we had a sane, determinate alphabet, instead of a hospital of
comminuted eunuchs, you would know whether one referred to the act of
a man casting the seed over the ploughed land or whether one wished to
recall the lady hog and the future ham.

It's a rotten alphabet. I appoint Mr. Carnegie to get after it, and
leave simplified spelling alone.

Simplified spelling brought about sun-spots, the San Francisco
earthquake, and the recent business depression, which we would never
have had if spelling had been left all alone.

Now, I hope I have soothed Mr. Carnegie and made him more comfortable
than he would have been had he received only compliment after
compliment, and I wish to say to him that simplified spelling is all
right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

SPELLING AND PICTURES

ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, AT THE
WALDORF-ASTORIA, SEPTEMBER 18, 1906

I am here to make an appeal to the nations in behalf of the simplified
spelling. I have come here because they cannot all be reached except
through you. There are only two forces that can carry light to all
the corners of the globe--only two--the sun in the heavens and the
Associated Press down here. I may seem to be flattering the sun, but I
do not mean it so; I am meaning only to be just and fair all around.
You speak with a million voices; no one can reach so many races, so many
hearts and intellects, as you--except Rudyard Kipling, and he cannot
do it without your help. If the Associated Press will adopt and use
our simplified forms, and thus spread them to the ends of the earth,
covering the whole spacious planet with them as with a garden of
flowers, our difficulties are at an end.

Every day of the three hundred and sixty-five the only pages of the
world's countless newspapers that are read by all the human beings and
angels and devils that can read, are these pages that are built out
of Associated Press despatches. And so I beg you, I beseech you--oh,
I implore you to spell them in our simplified forms. Do this daily,
constantly, persistently, for three months--only three months--it is all
I ask. The infallible result?--victory, victory all down the line. For
by that time all eyes here and above and below will have become adjusted
to the change and in love with it, and the present clumsy and ragged
forms wil