States has done constructive work in the Philippines, Porto Rico and Cuba, not entirely for its own gain and not without considerable expense.

Here in eastern Europe we have a problem greater than any which has faced the world since the United States became a nation. We are, I believe, able to cope with it if we have the desire and the leadership. We are the only nation in the world today with the money and the raw material. Such a work might be looked upon as humanitarian only; certainly the relief which would be afforded to millions of human beings cannot be left out of the reckoning. There is another great reason which, in itself, should be conclusive. The commercial world, of which our country is an important part, needs to have the millions of people of eastern Europe again take their place as producers, consumers and builders. Other nations would without question join in such an effort. Business and trade affiliations would grow out of it which would be of permanent benefit to the commerce of this country.

A great opportunity lies before us in the making of such a contribution to the progress of civilization. We as a people should take it.

ELIOT WADSWORTH.

IS GRAMMAR USELESS?

BY WALTER GUEST KELLOGG

THE study of English in our schools is today receiving so much attention and is recognized as of such vital importance that it is well to ascertain whether the system of teaching it is all that it should be. So many different subjects must be taught that it is axiomatic that no time, no energy should be wasted and that no subject should encumber our curriculums which is not necessary in itself nor adapted to the special needs of the students who desire it. In an age when so much stress is laid, not merely upon the studies with which those of an older day were familiar, but upon extensions and refinements of those studies, it is prudent occasionally to "take stock", so to speak, and to inquire whether we are not carrying upon our shelves shopworn goods which had better be relegated to our lumber room, thus to make way for other materials more appropriate to the needs and demands of our customers.

English grammar, as it is commonly taught, presents itself as Exhibit A. There may be other exhibits, but certainly none can be more damaging to the cause of popular education than this unneeded, unscholarly excresence which has persisted so many, many years, informing no one, occupying time and effort that could be more profitably employed, and justifying itself only from the point of view of the publishers who publish and the men and women who write the hundred and one books yearly under the name of English Grammar.

Sir Philip Sidney in his Apologie for Poetrie put the case in a nutshell when he wrote:

I know, some will say it (i. e. English) is a mingled language. And why not so much the better, taking the best of both the other? Another will say it wanteth Grammer. Nay truly, it hath that prayse, that it wanteth not Grammer: for Grammer it might have, but it needes it not; being so easie of itselfe, and so voyd of those cumbersome differ

ences of Cases, Genders, Moodes, and Tenses, which I thinke was a peece of the Tower of Babilon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole to learne his mother tongue.

If we are to learn Italian, Greek, Spanish or any other alien language, grammar is essential, unless we are to learn it in Italy, Greece, Spain or in an environment in which that language is the mother tongue, or the language commonly and generally spoken. In the United States, if we desire to speak Latin, we must have other canons to go by than the canon of usage, and a grammar will be of service; if, however, we are to learn English, we can best learn it from the common speech of the people about us.

A child speaks English that is quite sufficient for his purposes long before he attains school age, and constantly, without being formally taught, adds to his vocabulary words that he knows are the symbols for the thing he wants, and, as he grows, as his needs multiply, so his stock of words increases. Long before he enters a class-room, his capacity for understanding and for making himself understood in idiomatic English is marvelous.

The greatest writers of whom England can boast acquired English as the child acquires it, by use. Shakespeare, during the six years which comprehended his schooling, never saw nor heard of an English Grammar, nor did Sidney, Marlowe, Spenser, Milton and a host of later writers. The Grammar Schools of Shakespeare's time were Latin schools, the grammar taught was Latin grammar and it was taught in Latin. The first grammar of English did not appear until nearly a decade after Shakespeare had left Stratford to begin his career in London-and it was written in Latin. Shakespeare learned English by reading and speaking English and by hearing English spoken.

It would very probably have occurred to no one to write and publish an English Grammar had it not first occurred to a certain Dionysius Thrax to write and publish a Greek Grammar. The author of the Greek Grammar wrote it in order that Roman boys and girls might become conversant with Greek; it is quite possible that he would have laughed at the idea of a Greek Grammar for the youths of Athens. Yet, if Greek had a grammar, Latin must have a grammar and English, bound to keep in the

running, must have one. The fallacy persists; our grammars, appropriate for the foreign markets, unfortunately are believed to have been intended for home consumption. Why an American boy or girl should study English grammar when Shakespeare and Milton were successful in getting a fair hold on the language without it, and by means open to any boy or girl, is a mystery that not even time will solve.

It may be doubted if there exists such a thing today as English Grammar, as this subject is commonly understood and commonly taught. English, like Latin, Greek and German, was once a highly inflected language. During its passage down the years, it lost many of the formal characteristics so dear to the heart of the grammarian and it has emerged a vastly simple, rugged and uninflected form of expression. In losing much, it has gained immeasurably.

In the middle period in the history of a majority of tongues, inflection of case, tense, number, gender, etc., occupied altogether too prominent a place. As a means of denoting the relation of words in a sentence, it obtruded unduly upon the hearer's attention and served by its overelaboration and its variety of aspect to obscure the meaning which it purported to convey, exactly as excessive ornamentation obscures the effect of a painting or a piece of architecture. In their later periods, these languages gradually dropped many of their inflected forms, and the trend everywhere has since been toward a greater simplicity, toward a minimum of variants.

This tendency has been particularly noteworthy in the development of English where what is known as analysis has in great part superseded inflection. In Latin, for instance, amo is" I love," but " I loved" is amabam, and "I have loved" is amavi. If we would convey the notion expressed to a Roman by amavi, we do it by analysing or breaking up the conception of amavi into its component parts and write the three words: "I have loved ". The constant recurrence with us of the prepositions "for," "to," "of " and "by," instead of case forms, and of the auxiliary verbs "have," "will," "shall," "be" and "do," instead of complex verb forms, is an illustration of the make-shifts we have adopted to avoid the complications of conjugation and declension.

Our adjectives, our possessive pronouns, and our articles

no longer must be made to agree with their nouns-indeed they simply cannot be made to agree with them. We have one uninflected form of adjective and it functions perfectly with all nouns. Similarly, our possessive pronouns are interchangeable and we can say my hat and shoes" and signify precisely the same idea as the Frenchman inflects into his mon chapeau et mes souliers. And the French must say mon chapeau instead of ma chapeau simply because "hat" in French happens to be masculine.

We have in our nouns no vocative case, no nominative, no dative, no ablative case. Where the Romans inflected their nouns by declension, we say "Charles, what is it? Charles is a naughty boy. He hit Charles. He gave the ball to Charles. He sat with Charles ", and Charles in every instance bears all the outward and visible signs of the original Charles and appears quite unaware that he has been used in five different cases. He has been spared the humiliation of being successively Carole, Carolus, Carolum, Carolo and again Carole, as the Latin would have had him, and persists throughout as Charles, pure and simple. We may, of course, say Charles is in the vocative case because he is addressed and later in the accusative case because he happens to be hit, but assuredly he has not changed a bit and there would seem little reason in having to study about it in the dull pages of a grammar.

The possessive case is still inflectional: "Tom" becomes "Tom's ". The added s and the apostrophe are all that are left of declension; to form the plural we drop the apostrophe and add the s to the singular. The instances in which the plural is otherwise formed may be learned in half an hour.

In the verb, we can scarcely discern the few inflectional remnants of mood, tense, number and person. I, you, we, or they love, but he, she or it loves; I, you, we or they have; he, she or it has. The same verb may be indicative or imperative; the context, the tone of voice must determine in which sense it is used. The subjunctive has all but completely disappeared. We denote passivity not by a voice form, but analytically with the help of the auxiliary: "I am loved", "I am hated ".

Did we possess the intricate and illogical genders of Latin, French and German, the grammarian's lot would be happier. Almost alone among the languages of the world,