to be educated, whether political,
official, or religious, and they deprecate official control in such
matters. Every one objecting to some principle, they consent in
requiring that the central authority should have no principle at all;
but this lack of principle should not be extended to paralyse action
in questions that demand expert knowledge and judgement, such as
this question of phonetic teaching--and it shows that the public by
grudging authority to their own officers may only fall under a worse
tyranny, which they will suffer just because it has no authority.]

In the preceding section Mr. Jones' dictionary was taken as authority
for the actual condition of Southern English pronunciation. It must
now be considered in its other aspect, namely as the authoritative
phonetic interpretation of our speech; my contention being that it is
a wrong and mischievous interpretation.

It is difficult to keep these two questions quite apart. The first,
which was dealt with in Section 5, was that Southern English
is actively productive of homophones. This present Section 6 is
contending that the mischief is being encouraged and propagated by the
phoneticians, and Mr. Jones' books are taken as an example of their
method.

[Sidenote: Fault of Mr. Jones' method.]

The reason why the work of these phoneticians is so mischievous is
that they have chosen too low a standard of pronunciation.

The defence that they would make would be something like this.

They might argue with some confidence, and not without a good show of
reason, that the actual 'vernacular' talk of the people is the living
language of any country: they would allege that a spoken language is
always changing, and always will change; that the actual condition of
it is the only scientific, and indeed the only possible basis for any
system of tuition; and that it is better to be rather in advance of
change than behind it, since the changes proceed inevitably by laws
which education has no power to resist, nay, so inevitably that
science can in some measure foresee the future.

This would, I suppose, fairly represent Mr. Jones' contention. Indeed,
he plainly asserts that his work is merely a record of existing facts,
and he even says that he chose Southern English because it is most
familiar and observable, and therefore capable of providing him with
sufficient phenomena: and he might say that what I call 'low' in his
standard is only the record of a stage of pro