re doing useful work in supplying an educational
need. By the phonetic system any spoken language can now be learned
quickly and easily, just as by the _sol-fa_ system the teaching of
music was made easy and simple. If a clergyman who had no practical
knowledge of music were offered the post of minor canon in a
cathedral, he would find it very difficult to qualify himself
passably, whereas any village schoolboy could learn all the music
necessary for such an office, and learn that solidly too and soundly
and durably, in a few lessons, truly in a few hours, by the _sol-fa_
method. The principle is the same in music and in speech, namely to
have a distinct symbol for every separate sound; in music it is a
name, the idea of which quickly becomes indissociable from the note
of the scale which it indicates; in phonetics it is a written letter,
which differs from the units of our literary alphabet only in this,
that it has but one meaning and interpretation, and really is what all
letters were originally intended to be. When you see it you know what
it means.

[Sidenote: Its general adoption certain.]

The principle is but common sense, and practice confirms its validity.
I am persuaded that as soon as competition has exposed the advantages
which it ensures, not only in the saving of time, but in the rescuing
of English children from the blighting fog through which their tender
minds are now forced to struggle on the first threshold of life,[22]
then all spoken languages will be taught on that method. What now
chiefly hinders its immediate introduction is not so much the real
difficulty of providing a good simple system, as the false fear
that all our literature may take on the phonetic dress; and this
imagination is frightful enough to be a bugbear to reasonable people,
although, so far as one can see, there is no more danger of this
result than there is of all music appearing in sol-fa notation.

[Footnote 22: This is no exaggeration. Let a humane teacher think what
an infant's mind is, the delicate bud of intelligence opening on the
world, eager to adjust its awakening wonder to the realities of life,
absolutely simple, truthful, and receptive, reaching out its tender
faculties like the sensitive antennae of a new-born insect, that
feel forth upon the unknown with the faultless instinct of eternal
mind--one has only to imagine that condition to realize that the
most ingenious malignity could hardly contrive anything to