John Bright is still the most vigorous handler of a rhetorical club in all England. In the course of the great debate, last month, in the House of Commons, the Tories of high birth were badly represented by two or three orators of their rank. Mr. Bright crushed them fine by saying that “the brothers and sons of dukes use language more virulent, more coarse, more offensive and more ungentlemanly than is heard from a lower rank of speakers.” We suspect that the sentence is the reporter’s, not Bright’s; but the rebuke which he administered made a sensation which reminded Englishmen of the days when he described the political “Cave of Adullam” and its inhabitants.
The Prussian Chamber of Deputies recently debated the question of dueling, especially in the universities. A critical member began it by complaining of the idleness, drinking, gaming and dueling of the students. The curiosity which the debate brought to light is the fact that though dueling is forbidden by law, it has powerful friends in the Chamber and the government. Germany has forbidden the barbaric custom; but young Germans grow up in the belief that dueling is manly, and their seniors remember that they had the same disease in the universities. The German people are very sensitive to foreign criticism on this point; and probably the other civilized nations will by and by ridicule German dueling out of existence.
Curiosities of speech are always interesting, and it is a delightful business for grammatical people to scold their neighbors. The New York Tribune has had a bout with a few score correspondents on the duties of the neuter verb between subject and predicate; which must it agree with? The Tribune says with the real subject; the other folks say there are two subjects, and that the verb must agree with the last. All the malcontents quote “The wages of sin is death.” The Tribune has three or four answers; its best is that death is the true subject; its second best is that wages used to be singular. In “The Contributors’ Club” of the Atlantic Monthly, another class of errors is discussed, such as the dropping of h in which and when, a common thing in and around New York, and the suppression of r in many words. The English say lud, we say lawd. While just touching this interesting topic we call attention to a Meadville eccentricity. It is the rising inflection at the end of questions, such as, “Is he sick?” Can any reader tell us whether this locution (or rather inflection) is a localism only?
There is a lamentably large number of illiterates in the United States. Let us reduce the number as fast as possible. But let us stop assuming that the spelling book will rub the Decalogue into the conscience. Our immediate troubles and dangers come from literates who are as bright as lightning, and almost as destructive. We shall not get moral education by way of the spelling book. The statistical proof that we do is defective. We may count up the illiterate rogues in prison with much satisfaction, if we forget that the literate rogues are too smart to be caught and caged. Moral character does not result from intellectual training. Thirty years ago we had this straight, and taught that an educated bad man was a much more dangerous beast than an uneducated bad man.
A few kind-hearted people have for several years conducted a crusade against horse-shoes. They claim that the horse-shoe is a piece of unprofitable cruelty. They furnish examples and drive their own horses unshod. Among their examples is this: “In Africa, a horse working in a post-cart does, barefoot, over hard ground, twenty-four miles in two hours.” One view is that our horse-shoeing bill would pay off the national debt in a few generations. It is rather remarkable that these reformers do not receive more attention. We hope they will soon get the general ear; hence this note.