Wherever one looks closely into the causes and determining influences of the great convulsions of this time, one is more and more impressed by the apparent smallness of the ultimate directing influence.  It seems to me at least that it is a practically proven thing that this vast aggression of Germany is to be traced back to a general tone of court thinking and discussion in the Prussia of the eighteenth century, to the theories of a few professors and the gathering trend of German education in a certain direction.  It seems to me that similarly the language teachers of to-day and to-morrow may hold in their hands the seeds of gigantic international developments in the future.

It is not a question of the skill or devotion of individual teachers so much as of the possibility of organising them upon a grand scale.  An individual teacher must necessarily use the ordinary books and ordinary spelling and type of the language in which he is giving instruction; he may get a few elementary instruction books from a private publisher, specially printed for teaching purposes, but very speedily he finds himself obliged to go to the current printed matter.  This, as I will immediately show, bars the most rapid and fruitful method of teaching.  And in this as in most affairs, private enterprise, the individualistic system, shows itself a failure.  In England, for example, the choice of Russian lesson books is poor and unsatisfactory, and there is either no serviceable Russian-English, English-Russian school dictionary in existence, or it is published so badly as to be beyond the range of my inquiries.  But a state, or a group of universities, or even a rich private association such as far-seeing American, French and British business men might be reasonably expected to form, could attack the problem of teaching a language in an altogether different fashion.

The difficulty in teaching English lies in the inconsistency of the spelling, and the consequent difficulties of pronunciation.  If there were available an ample series of text-books, reading books, and books of general interest, done in a consistent phonetic type and spelling—­in which the value of the letters of the phonetic system followed as far as possible the prevalent usage in Europe—­the difficulty in teaching English not merely to foreigners but, as the experiments in teaching reading of the Simplified Spelling Society have proved up to the hilt, to English children can be very greatly reduced.  At first the difficulty of the irrational spelling can be set on one side.  The learner attacks and masters the essential language.  Then afterwards he can, if he likes, go on to the orthodox spelling, which is then no harder for him to read and master than it is for an Englishman of ordinary education to read the facetious orthography of Artemus Ward or of the Westminster Gazette “orfis boy.”  The learner does one thing at a time instead of attempting, as he would otherwise have to do, two things—­and they are both difficult and different and conflicting things—­simultaneously.