an irregular volunteer often incompletely
uniformed; and when he was captured the Prussians shot him as a
guerrilla. It will be a welcome relief if _camouflage_, as popular five
years ago as _fin-de-siecle_ twenty-five years ago, shall follow that
now unfashionable vocable into what an American president once described
as 'innocuous desuetude'. Perhaps we may liken _mitrailleuse_ and
_franc-tireur, vrille_ and _escadrille, brisance_ and _rafale_, to the
foreign labourers who cross the frontier to aid in the harvest and who
return to their own country when the demand for their service is over.

III

The principle which ought to govern can be stated simply. English
should be at liberty to help itself freely to every foreign word which
seems to fill a want in our own language. It ought to take these words
on probation, so to speak, keeping those which prove themselves useful,
and casting out those which are idle or rebellious. And then those which
are retained ought to become completely English, in pronunciation, in
accent, in spelling, and in the formation of their plurals. No doubt
this is to-day a counsel of perfection; but it indicates the goal which
should be strived for. It is what English was capable of accomplishing
prior to the middle of the seventeenth century. It is what English may
be able to accomplish in the middle of the twentieth century, if we once
awaken to the danger of contaminating our speech with unassimilated
words, and to the disgrace, which our stupidity or laziness must bring
upon us, of addressing the world in a pudding-stone and piebald
language. Dr. Bradley has warned us that 'the pedantry that would bid
us reject the word fittest for our purpose because it is not of native
origin ought to be strenuously resisted'; and I am sure that he would
advocate an equally strenuous resistance to the pedantry which would
impose upon us words of alien tongue still clad in foreign uniform.

Mark Twain once remarked that 'everybody talks about the weather and
nobody does anything about it'. And many people think that we might as
well hope to direct the course of the winds as to order the evolution
of our speech. Some words have proved intractable. In the course of the
past two centuries and a half, scores and even hundreds of French words
have domiciled themselves in English without relinquishing their French
characteristics. Consider the sad case of _elite_ (which Byron used a
hundred years ago), o