d, maintain
their credit by sneering. The rapid progress of the language among the
people settled the matter, however. The astonishing rapidity with which
it is acquired has always been a wonder, and was the first thing about
it that struck the writer of this article. In my own observation,
Indian children will take one or two, at times several, years to master
the English printed and written language, but in a few days can read
and write in Cherokee. They do the latter, in fact, as soon as they
learn to shape letters. As soon as they master the alphabet they have
got rid of all the perplexing questions in orthography that puzzle the
brains of our children. Is it not too much to say that a child will
learn in a month, by the same effort, as thoroughly, in the language of
Se-quo-yah, that which in ours consumes the time of our children for at
least two years.

There has been a great clamor for a universal language. We once had it,
in our learned world, in the Latin, in which books were locked up for
the scholars and dead to the world. Language is the handmaiden of
thought, and to be useful must be obedient to its changes as well as
its elemental characteristics. For the English of three hundred years
ago we need a glossary, and to carry down his immortal thoughts in
their pristine vigor, must have, every two hundred years, a Johnson to
modernize a Shakspeare. To probe the causes of the change of language,
to ascertain why even a WRITTEN language is mutable, to pick up this
garment of thought and run its threads back through all their vagaries
to their origin and points of divergence, is one of the grand tasks for
the intellectual historian. He, indeed, must give us the history of
ideas, of which all art, including language, is but the fructification.
To say, therefore, that the alphabet of Se-quo-yah is better adapted
for his language than our alphabet is for the English, would be to pay
it a very wretched compliment.

George Gist received all honor from his countrymen. A short time after
his invention written communication was opened up by means of it with
that portion of the Cherokee Nation then in their new home west of the
Arkansas. Zealous in his work, he traveled many hundred miles to teach
it to them; and it is no reproach to their intellect to say that they
received it readily.

It has been said the Indians are besotted against all improvements. The
cordiality with which this was received is worthy of attentio