necessarily know also the spelling, this being in all cases in perfect
conformity with that. The anticipation of this gain rests upon two
assumptions which are tacitly taken for granted, but both of them
erroneous.

The first of these assumptions is, that all men pronounce all words
alike, so that whenever they come to spell a word, they will exactly
agree as to what the outline of its sound is. Now we are sure men will
not do this from the fact that, before there was any fixed and settled
orthography in our language, when therefore everybody was more or less a
phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to _him_,
(for he had no other law to guide him,) the variations of spelling were
infinite. Take for instance the word 'sudden'; which does not seem to
promise any great scope for variety. I have myself met with this word
spelt in the following fifteen ways among our early writers: 'sodain',
'sodaine', 'sodan', 'sodayne', 'sodden', 'sodein', 'sodeine', 'soden',
'sodeyn', 'suddain', 'suddaine', 'suddein', 'suddeine', 'sudden',
'sudeyn'. Again, in how many ways was Raleigh's name spelt, or
Shakespeare's? The same is evident from the spelling of uneducated
persons in our own day. They have no other rule but the sound to guide
them. How is it that they do not all spell alike; erroneously, it may
be, as having only the sound for their guide, but still falling all into
exactly the same errors? What is the actual fact? They not merely spell
wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our perverse system of
spelling, but with an inexhaustible diversity of error, and that too in
the case of simplest words. Thus the little town of Woburn would seem to
give small room for caprice in spelling, while yet the postmaster there
has made, from the superscription of letters that have passed through
his hands, a collection of two hundred and forty-four varieties of ways
in which the place has been spelt{231}. It may be replied that these
were all or nearly all from the letters of the ignorant and uneducated.
Exactly so;--but it is for their sakes, and to place them on a level
with the educated, or rather to accelerate their education by the
omission of a useless yet troublesome discipline, that the change is
proposed. I wish to show you that after the change they would be just as
much, or almost as much, at a loss in their spelling as now.

{Sidenote: _Pronouncing Dictionaries_}

And another reason which would make it qui