redundant here, are deficient
there; our English perhaps is as greatly at fault as any, and with that
we have chiefly to do. Unquestionably it has more letters than one to
express one and the same sound; it has only one letter to express two or
three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable of being expressed at
all by awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same time we must
accept the fact, as we accept any other which it is out of our power to
change--with regret, indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one
accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty miles nearer
to England--that it is so difficult to get round Cape Horn--that the
climate of Africa is so fatal to European life. A people will no more
quit their alphabet than they will quit their language; they will no
more consent to modify the one _ab extra_ than the other. Caesar avowed
that with all his power he could not introduce a new word, and certainly
Claudius could not introduce a new letter. Centuries may sanction the
bringing in of a new one, or the dropping of an old. But to imagine that
it is possible to suddenly introduce a group of ten new letters, as
these reformers propose--they might just as feasibly propose that the
English language should form its comparatives and superlatives on some
entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion, by the terminations 'oteros'
and 'otatos'; or that we should agree to set up a dual; or that our
substantives should return to our Anglo-Saxon declensions. Any one of
these or like proposals would not betray a whit more ignorance of the
eternal laws which regulate human language, and of the limits within
which deliberate action upon it is possible, than does this of
increasing our alphabet by ten entirely novel signs.

But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty letters to have so
little sacredness in them that Englishmen would endure a crowd of
upstart interlopers to mix themselves on an equal footing with them,
still this could only be from a sense of the greatness of the advantage
to be derived from this introduction. Now the vast advantage claimed by
the advocates of the system is, that it would facilitate the learning to
read, and wholly save the labour of learning to spell, which "on the
present plan occupies", as they assure us, "at the very lowest
calculation from three to five years". Spelling, it is said, would no
longer need to be learned at all; since whoever knew the sound, would