These two practical considerations expose the situation sufficiently:  we may now face the triple-tongued dragon and exhibit how a single whiff of common sense will tumble all his three heads in the dust.

[Sidenote:  The natural right method.]

The insideoutness, topsy-turviness, and preposterousness of Mr. Jones’ method is incredible.  In the natural order of things, children would be taught a careful ‘high standard’ articulation as a part of their elemental training, when in their pliant age they are mastering the co-ordinations which are so difficult to acquire later.  Then when they have been educated to speak correctly, their variation from that full pronunciation is a natural carelessness, and has the grace of all natural behaviour, and it naturally obeys whatever laws have been correctly propounded by phoneticians; since it is itself the phenomena from which those laws are deduced.  This carelessness or ease of speech will vary naturally in all degrees according to occasion, and being dependent on mood and temper will never go wrong.  It is warm and alive with expression of character, and may pass quite unselfconsciously from the grace of negligence to the grace of correctness, for it has correctness at command, having learned it, and its carelessness has not been doctored and bandaged; and this ease of unselfconsciousness is one of the essentials of human intercourse:  a man talking fluently does not consider what words he will use, he does not often remember exactly what words he has used, nor will he know at all how he pronounces them; his speech flows from him as his blood flows when his flesh is wounded.

[Sidenote:  What Mr. Jones would substitute.]

What would Mr. Jones’ system substitute for this natural grace?  In place of a wide scale of unconscious variation he provides his pupils with ‘three styles’, three different fixed grades of pronunciation,[25] which they must apply consciously as suits the occasion.  At dinner you might be called on to talk to a bishop across the table in your best style B, or to an archbishop even in your A1, when you were talking to your neighbours in your best C.—­Nature would no doubt assert herself and secure a fair blend; but none the less, the three styles are plainly alternatives and to some extent mutually exclusive, whereas natural varieties are harmoniously interwoven and essentially one.

[Footnote 25:  Of course Mr. Jones knows that these are not and cannot be fixed.  He must often bewail in secret the exigencies of his ’styles’.]

Argumentative analogies are commonly chosen because they are specious rather than just; but there is one here which I cannot forbear.  If a system like Mr. Jones’ were adopted in teaching children to write, we should begin by collecting and comparing all the careless and hasty handwritings of the middle class and deduce from them the prevalent forms of the letters in that state of degradation.  From