cture or word relations. We must begin our study
at just the opposite end from the Latin or Greek; but our teachers of
language have balked at a complete reversal of method, the power of
custom and time has been too strong, and in the matter of grammar we are
still the slaves of the ancient world. As for spelling, the
irregularities of our language seem to have driven us to one sole method,
memorizing: and to memorize every word in a language is an appalling
task. Our rhetoric we have inherited from the middle ages, from
scholiasts, refiners, and theological logicians, a race of men who got
their living by inventing distinctions and splitting hairs. The fact is,
prose has had a very low place in the literature of the world until
within a century; all that was worth saying was said in poetry, which the
rhetoricians were forced to leave severely alone, or in oratory, from
which all their rules were derived; and since written prose language
became a universal possession through the printing press and the
newspaper we have been too busy to invent a new rhetoric.

Now, language is just as much a natural growth as trees or rocks or human
bodies, and it can have no more irregularities, even in the matter of
spelling, than these have. Science would laugh at the notion of
memorizing every individual form of rock. It seeks the fundamental laws,
it classifies and groups, and even if the number of classes or groups is
large, still they have a limit and can be mastered. Here we have a
solution of the spelling problem. In grammar we find seven fundamental
logical relationships, and when we have mastered these and their chief
modifications and combinations, we have the essence of grammar as truly
as if we knew the name for every possible combination which our seven
fundamental relationships might have. Since rhetoric is the art of
appealing to the emotions and intelligence of our hearers, we need to
know, not the names of all the different artifices which may be employed,
but the nature and laws of emotion and intelligence as they may be reached
through language; for if we know what we are hitting at, a little
practice will enable us to hit accurately; whereas if we knew the name of
every kind of blow, and yet were ignorant of the thing we were hitting at,
namely the intelligence and emotion of our fellow man, we would be forever
striking into the air,---striking cleverly perhaps, but ineffectively.

Having got our bearings,