We must not forget, therefore, that our written speech is not merely a way of setting down our spoken speech in print.  This is exactly what our friends the spelling reformers appear to have forgotten.  The name that they have given to what they propose to do, indicates this clearly.  When a word as written and as spoken have drifted apart, it is usually the spoken word that has changed.  Reform, therefore, would be accomplished by restoring the old spoken form.  Instead of this, it is proposed to change the written form.  In other words, the two languages are to be forced together by altering that one of them that is by its essence the most immutable.  Where the written word has been corrupted as in spelling “guild” for “gild,” the adoption of the simpler spelling is a reform; otherwise, not.

Now is the possession of two languages, a spoken and a written, an advantage or not?  With regard to the spoken tongue, the question answers itself.  If we were all deaf and dumb, we could still live and carry on business, but we should be badly handicapped.  On the other hand, if we could neither read nor write, we should simply be in the position of our remote forefathers or even of many in our own day and our own land.  What then is the reasons for a separate written language, beyond the variety thereby secured, by the use of two senses, hearing and sight, instead of only one?

Evidently the chief reason is that written speech is eminently fitted for preservation.  Without the transmittal of ideas from one generation to another, intellectual progress is impossible.  Such transmittal, before the invention of writing, was effected solely by memory.  The father spoke to the son, and he, remembering what was said, told it, in turn, to the grandson.  This is tradition, sometimes marvellously accurate, but often untrustworthy.  And as it is without check, there is no way of telling whether a given fact, so transmitted, is or is not handed down faithfully.  Now we have the phonograph for preserving and accurately reproducing spoken language.  If this had been invented before the introduction of written language, we might never have had the latter; as it is, the device comes on the field too late to be a competitor with the book in more than a very limited field.  For preserving particular voices, such as those of great men, or for recording intonation and pronunciation, it fills a want that writing and printing could never supply.

For the long preservation of ideas and their conveyance to a human mind, written speech is now the indispensable vehicle.  And, as has been said, this is how man makes progress.  We learn in two ways:  by undergoing and reflecting on our own experiences and by reading and reflecting on those of others.  Neither of these ways is sufficient in itself.  A child bound hand and foot and confined in a dark room would not be a fit subject for instruction, but neither would he reach a high level if placed on a desert island far from his kind and forced to rely solely on his own experiences.  The experiences of our forebears, read in the light of our own; the experiences of our forebears, used as a starting-point from which we may move forward to fresh fields—­these we must know and appreciate if we are to make progress.  This means the book and its use.