ad words. Half our speech consists
of similes that remind us of no similarity; of pictorial phrases that
call up no picture; of historical allusions the origin of which we have
forgotten. Take any instance on which the eye happens to alight. I saw
in the paper some days ago that the well-known leader of a certain
religious party wrote to a supporter of his the following curious words:
"I have not forgotten the talented way in which you held up the banner
at Birkenhead." Taking the ordinary vague meaning of the word
"talented," there is no coherency in the picture. The trumpets blow, the
spears shake and glitter, and in the thick of the purple battle there
stands a gentleman holding up a banner in a talented way. And when we
come to the original force of the word "talent" the matter is worse: a
talent is a Greek coin used in the New Testament as a symbol of the
mental capital committed to an individual at birth. If the religious
leader in question had really meant anything by his phrases, he would
have been puzzled to know how a man could use a Greek coin to hold up a
banner. But really he meant nothing by his phrases. "Holding up the
banner" was to him a colourless term for doing the proper thing, and
"talented" was a colourless term for doing it successfully.

Now my own fear touching anything in the way of phonetic spelling is
that it would simply increase this tendency to use words as counters and
not as coins. The original life in a word (as in the word "talent")
burns low as it is: sensible spelling might extinguish it altogether.
Suppose any sentence you like: suppose a man says, "Republics generally
encourage holidays." It looks like the top line of a copy-book. Now, it
is perfectly true that if you wrote that sentence exactly as it is
pronounced, even by highly educated people, the sentence would run:
"Ripubliks jenrally inkurrij hollidies." It looks ugly: but I have not
the smallest objection to ugliness. My objection is that these four
words have each a history and hidden treasures in them: that this
history and hidden treasure (which we tend to forget too much as it is)
phonetic spelling tends to make us forget altogether. Republic does not
mean merely a mode of political choice. Republic (as we see when we look
at the structure of the word) means the Public Thing: the abstraction
which is us all.

A Republican is not a man who wants a Constitution with a President. A
Republican is a man who prefers to think