r. Jones would substitute.]

What would Mr. Jones' system substitute for this natural grace? In
place of a wide scale of unconscious variation he provides his
pupils with 'three styles', three different fixed grades of
pronunciation,[25] which they must apply consciously as suits the
occasion. At dinner you might be called on to talk to a bishop across
the table in your best style B, or to an archbishop even in your A1,
when you were talking to your neighbours in your best C.--Nature would
no doubt assert herself and secure a fair blend; but none the less,
the three styles are plainly alternatives and to some extent mutually
exclusive, whereas natural varieties are harmoniously interwoven and
essentially one.

[Footnote 25: Of course Mr. Jones knows that these are not and
cannot be fixed. He must often bewail in secret the exigencies of his
'styles'.]

Argumentative analogies are commonly chosen because they are specious
rather than just; but there is one here which I cannot forbear. If a
system like Mr. Jones' were adopted in teaching children to write, we
should begin by collecting and comparing all the careless and hasty
handwritings of the middle class and deduce from them the prevalent
forms of the letters in that state of degradation. From this we should
construct in our 'style B' the alphabet which we should contend to
be the genuine natural product of inevitable law, and hallowed by
'general use', and this we should give to our children to copy and
learn, relegating the more carefully formed writing to a 'style A,
taught by writing masters', explaining that its 'peculiarities' were
'modifications produced involuntarily as the result of writing more
slowly or endeavouring to write more distinctly', &c.[26]

[Footnote 26: _Phonetic Transcriptions of English_, by D. Jones, 1907,
Introd., p. v, 'The peculiarities of Style A as compared with Style
B are especially marked. These differences are partly natural, i.e.
modifications produced involuntarily as the result of speaking
more slowly or of endeavouring to speak more distinctly, and partly
artificial, i.e. modifications due to the well-established though
perhaps somewhat arbitrary rules laid down by teachers of elocution,'
&c., and Mr. Jones is quite right in complaining that his pupils make
fools of themselves when they try to speak slower.]

I believe that there has never been in Europe a fluent script so
beautiful and legible as that of our very best Engl