Lord Rosebery made an amusing, though somewhat incoherent, speech at
Hawick on Tuesday on the occasion of the jubilee celebration of the local Archaeological Society. Lord Rosebery expressed his disappointment that Dr. Murray, the president of the Society, had said nothing about President Roosevelt's spelling reform. His own view was that it was a blow struck at morality itself. Only the conscientious and virtuous were hampered by the laws of spelling. "The unscrupulous and intrepid spelled ahead according to phonetic rules of their own, and produced a result full of acceptance to themselves and sometimes under- stood by others." On the other hand, the conscientious effort to adhere to the archaic rules led to perplexity. much misery, and possibly lunacy. What was the use of the rule for spelling certain puzzling words according to their derivation from the Latin or the reverse if you knew no Latin? Hence he might claim that the conscientious speller" was apt to fail, to be distressed in his conscience, and to be relegated to a lunatic scene of repose, whereas the man who had no nerves, no conscience, no bowels, spelled on without regard to correctness and preserved his intelligence—such as it was—intact, and might in the last moments of his life be honoured by the homage of the President of the United States."
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