Our recent correspondence regarding Simplified Spelling has developed a few points which we submit to those who abominate it, those who favor it, and those who, like the eminent school-superintendent we have already quoted, and like ourselves for that matter, do both: 

To a leading Professor of Greek: 

I am more hopeful than you that the repetition of a consonant beginning the second syllable of a dissyllable, to close the preceding syllable, as in “differ”, “fiddle”, “gobble”, etc., wil “be generally accepted”, especially in view of the fact that it is alreddy “generally accepted”, and needs only to be extended to a minority of words.

“Annutther” is not “a fair illustration”.  On the contrary, it is an exception that I probably was very injudicious to call any attention to; and the trouble with you scholars, I find all the way thru, is that you permit those little exceptions to influence you too much.  If a good simplification is ever effected, it will be by cutting Gordian knots, and you all of you seem absolutely incapable of anything of the kind.  I don’t expect anyhow to make much out of a man who will spell “peepl” “peopl”.  Imagine all this said with a grin, not a frown!!

    You wil never get back to “the old sounds” of the vowels, in God’s
    world.

As to the long sounds, I am going in for all I am worth on the double vowels.  I alreddy agree with the English Society on “faather”, “feel” and “scuul”, and am going to do all I can for niit, and for spredding the oo in floor and door into snore, more, hole, poke, etc.  “Awl”, “cow” and “go” are spelt wel, and their spelling shoud be spred.  These seem to be the lines of least resistance.  I find that they work first-rate in my own riting.

    You make enuf serious objections to diacritical marks, but my
    serious objection to them is that they ar obstacles to lerners,
    especially forreners.

From his answer: 

All right; I catch the grin, and cheerfully grin back.  The business of a scholar (Emerson’s “man thinking”, Plato’s [Greek:  philosophos]) is to take as long views as he can; in this case, to look far beyond the possibilities of my life-time.  The more you people with the shorter views, as I venture to think them, agitate for and practise each little partial solution, the more you help on the threshing out which must go on for many years before we can arrive at any general solution.  So, more power to your elbow!

Meantime my own spelling will continue to be—­like the conventional spelling of the printers of today—­a hodge-podge of inconsistencies, quite indefensible on rational grounds, and varying with circumstances.  Of course the rational way to spell people is piipl, or pipl.

Which we think is an attempt to bolster up a lost cause.