ar, and many other people, Occidental and Oriental, I surmise,
not excluding the Turks and the Chinese, have for the symbol of
education, of civility, a tone-standard; we alone flourish in
undisturbed and in something like sublime unconsciousness of any such
possibility."

So searching an arraignment by so eminent a scholar before an audience
of so high a degree of intelligence and culture seems to have been
necessary to command an adequate appreciation of the condition of "Our
Speech" and to incite an adequate effort toward reform. Since the
arraignment was made and afterward published, classes have been
organized, books written, and lectures delivered in increasing
abundance, forming a veritable speech crusade--and the books and the
classes and the lectures have availed much, but the real and only
"reliable remedy" lies with the teacher in the public and private
schools and colleges of the United States. And it is to the teacher of
English and Elocution that this _Class Book on Vocal Expression_ is
offered.

_Learning to Talk_ might have been a truer, as it had been a simpler,
title, yet the more comprehensive phrase has justifiable significance,
and we have chosen it in the same spirit which discards for the
text-book in Rhetoric or English Composition the inviting title
_Learning to Write_.

There is a close analogy between the evolution of vocal and the
evolution of verbal expression. The method of instruction in the study
of the less heeded subject of the "Spoken Word" throws an interesting
light on the teaching of the more regarded question of the "Written
Word." An experience as teacher of expression and English in a normal
school in Minnesota has influenced the author of these pages to so large
an extent in the formulation of her own method of study, and so in the
plan of this volume, that it seems advisable to record it. To the work
of reading or expression to which she was originally called two classes
in composition were added. The former teacher of composition had
bequeathed to the work as a text-book a rhetoric which consisted of
involved theory plus one hundred and twenty-five separate and distinct
rules for the use of words, and the teacher of expression found, to her
amazed dismay, that the students had been required to learn these rules,
not only "by heart," but by number, referring to them as rule six or
thirty-six or one hundred and twenty-five, according to the demanded
application.

A week, p