We are disposed to do a little gratuitous advertising for good causes. Below is the first essay. It is perfectly genuine. Please send us some more.
Help Wanted. From a young gentleman of education, leisure and energy, who desires to devote a part of his time, in connection with scholars and philanthropists, to a reform of world-wide importance. Such a person may possibly learn of a congenial opportunity by addressing.
X.T.C.
Care ofThe Unpopular Review.
A few hundred persons of the kind whose help is sought by this advertisement would have the salvation of the republic in their hands. But somehow those who have the leisure generally lack the desire; and those who have the desire generally lack the leisure.
Simplified Spelling
After receiving, in answer to the invitation in our first number, a few bitter objections to simplified spelling, we have felt like apologizing each time we approached the subject. Perhaps the best apology we can make is that apparently the majority of our readers are interested in it. Therefore we hope that the others will tolerate as equably as they can, the devotion of a little space to it in the interest of the majority. Perhaps the objectors may ultimately be able to settle the difficulty as we and our house have settled another unconquerable nuisance—the dandelions on our lawns—: we have concluded to like them.
Our recent correspondence regarding Simplified Spelling has developed a few points which we submit to those who abominate it, those who favor it, and those who, like the eminent school-superintendent we have already quoted, and like ourselves for that matter, do both:
To a leading Professor of Greek:
I am more hopeful than you that the repetition of a consonant beginning the second syllable of a dissyllable, to close the preceding syllable, as in “differ”, “fiddle”, “gobble”, etc., wil “be generally accepted”, especially in view of the fact that it is alreddy “generally accepted”, and needs only to be extended to a minority of words.