y great relative superiorities before it can expect to be
allowed even a hearing: and such a claim must lie in its superiority
in some practical or ideal quality: further than that it might allege
that it was the legitimate heir of our great literature, and in
possession of the citadel, and in command of an extensive machinery
for its propaganda.

Now, in my opinion it could not establish any one of these claims
except the last, namely its central position and wide machinery.

I do not pretend to foresee the future, nor even to desire it in any
particular form; but it seems to me probable that if the 'P.S.P.'
continues its downward course as indicated by Mr. Jones, then,
unless everything else worsens with it, so that it might maintain
its relative flotation in a general confusion, it must fall to be
disesteemed and repudiated, and give place to one or more other
dialects which, by having better preserved the distinctions
of pronunciation, will be not only more convenient vehicles of
intercourse, but more truthful and intelligible interpreters of our
great literature; and I believe this to be well illustrated by the
conditions of our 'S.E.' homophones: and that something better should
win the first place, I hold to be the most desirable of possible
events. But perhaps our 'S.E.' is not yet so far committed to the
process of decay as to be incapable of reform, and the machinery that
we use for penetration may be used as well for organizing a reform and
for enforcing it. There is as much fashion as inevitable law in our
'P.S.P.' or 'S.E.' talk, and if the fashion for a better, that is a
more distinct and conservative, pronunciation should set in, then at
the cost of a little temporary self-consciousness we might, in one
generation, or at least in two, have things again very much as they
were in Shakespeare's day. It is true that men are slaves to the
naturalness of what is usual with them, and unable to imagine that the
actual living condition of things in their own time is evanescent: nor
do even students and scholars see that in the Elizabethan literature
we have a perdurable gigantic picture which, among all stages
of change, will persistently reassert itself, while any special
characteristics of our own day, which seem so unalterable to us, are
only a movement, which may no doubt be determining the next movement,
but will leave no other trace of itself, at least no more than the
peculiarities of the age of Queen Ann