TEMPTING THE LIGHTNING

Litterateurs shrieked with dismay when President Roosevelt tried to force simplified spelling down the throat of the Congressional Record. Esperanto was tortured to death with fiendish glee by the barbed criticisms of philologists. And yet Mr. Eurique Blanco, writing in the international Book Review, has tempted the lightning of such a champion as Mr. Mencken by declaring that English is not "easy to learn" and that before if can become a world language its innate perversity must be destroyed.

The schoolboy who has chewed his pencil top ragged trying to decide between an el and an ie will be the first to favor Mr. Blaneo's suggestion. But those who have emerged from that untutored age usually take a craftsman's delight in puzzling out the jumble of vowels and consonants that represent primitive grunts and groans. Even if by simplification English could become the world's language a vigorous cry must be raised against such a process.

Gold serves very well as a medium of international understanding. Providing he has a plentiful supply of it the American traveller can journey from Oshkosh to Shanghai without once using anything but sound English oaths and a simple sign language. To hear the dusky Malays chew American gum and chatter the same English patois that could be heard at home would take not a little of the mystery and romance out of travel. And if predictions proved correct so that through a common tongue all nations of the world arrived at mutual understanding and peace the entire company of admirals and generals, armies, and militant statesmen would be lost for ever from a materialistic age thirsting for the wine of chivalry and pining for the fanfare of battle.

For the very sake of its good name and moral leadership the United States must protest against simplified English as a world language. The export of American movies to the Orient has already done untold harm in revealing to an unsuspecting people the depths of American degradation. If on top of these pictures there arrived a flood of more magazines in an understandable American, and a deluge of Hearst papers the thoroughly moral and harmless races of the world might well rise in horror in exterminate a degenerate nations.