Every day of the three hundred and sixty-five the only pages of the world’s countless newspapers that are read by all the human beings and angels and devils that can read, are these pages that are built out of Associated Press despatches.  And so I beg you, I beseech you—­oh, I implore you to spell them in our simplified forms.  Do this daily, constantly, persistently, for three months—­only three months—­it is all I ask.  The infallible result?—­victory, victory all down the line.  For by that time all eyes here and above and below will have become adjusted to the change and in love with it, and the present clumsy and ragged forms will be grotesque to the eye and revolting to the soul.  And we shall be rid of phthisis and phthisic and pneumonia and pneumatics, and diphtheria and pterodactyl, and all those other insane words which no man addicted to the simple Christian life can try to spell and not lose some of the bloom of his piety in the demoralizing attempt.  Do not doubt it.  We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change places with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.  We do not regret our old, yellow fangs and snags and tushes after we have worn nice, fresh, uniform store teeth a while.

Do I seem to be seeking the good of the world?  That is the idea.  It is my public attitude; privately I am merely seeking my own profit.  We all do it, but it is sound and it is virtuous, for no public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.  In 1883, when the simplified-spelling movement first tried to make a noise, I was indifferent to it; more—­I even irreverently scoffed at it.  What I needed was an object-lesson, you see.  It is the only way to teach some people.  Very well, I got it.  At that time I was scrambling along, earning the family’s bread on magazine work at seven cents a word, compound words at single rates, just as it is in the dark present.  I was the property of a magazine, a seven-cent slave under a boiler-iron contract.  One day there came a note from the editor requiring me to write ten pages—­on this revolting text:  “Considerations concerning the alleged subterranean holophotal extemporaneousness of the conchyliaceous superimbrication of the Ornithorhyncus, as foreshadowed by the unintelligibility of its plesiosaurian anisodactylous aspects.”

Ten pages of that.  Each and every word a seventeen-jointed vestibuled railroad train.  Seven cents a word.  I saw starvation staring the family in the face.  I went to the editor, and I took a stenographer along so as to have the interview down in black and white, for no magazine editor can ever remember any part of a business talk except the part that’s got graft in it for him and the magazine.  I said, “Read that text, Jackson, and let it go on the record; read it out loud.”  He read it:  “Considerations concerning the alleged subterranean holophotal extemporaneousness of the conchyliaceous superimbrication of the Ornithorhyncus, as foreshadowed by the unintelligibility of its plesiosaurian anisodactylous aspects.”