Thank you very much for the courtesy of your letter of 9th April.  I was surprised to receive it, as I did not suppose that your multifarious duties would permit you to notice my rather feeble protest.  I was somewhat amused that you should think my irritation so extreme as to call for an effort to console me.  I am sure I appreciate your attempt to do so.  But really, I was not so hard hit as you thought, because I do not expect in my day (I am no longer a young man) to see the champions of “simplified spelling” (some of it seems to me the reverse of “simplified”) gain such headway as to materially mar my pleasure in the printed page, for I do not believe you will allow the atrocities of the last few pages of your first number to creep into the delightful essays which render THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW such pleasant and profitable reading....

I do not think any great respect is due the opinion of those who think that a simplified spelling would save a great deal of time among children, for it also seems to have its rules which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system....

    Why thru?  U does not always have the sound of double o—­very
    rarely in fact.  Why not throo—­if the aim is to make the written
    sign correspond to the sound.  Thru suggests huh.

From our answer: 

Regarding “thru”, you justly say that u does not always have the sound of oo.  The only sound of oo worthy of respect, with which I have an acquaintance, is in “door” and “floor”.  The idea of using it to represent a u sound is perhaps the culminating absurdity of our spelling.

Your statement that simplified spelling “seems to have its rules which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system” overlooks the advantage that writing with a phonetic alphabet, like those of Europe, has over writing with purely conventional characters, as in China.  Now English writing is probably the least phonetic in Europe.  Simplifying it in any of the well-known proposed methods would be making it more phonetic, and consequently easier.  At present it is a mass of contradictions, and the rules that can be extracted from it are overburdened with exceptions.  Simplification will decrease both the exceptions and the rules themselves.  There are now several ways of representing each of many sounds, and therefore several “rules” to be learned for each of such sounds.  Simplification will tend to reduce those rules to one for each sound, and so far as it succeeds, will not “present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system.”

All the degrees of reformed spelling now in use are professedly but transitional.  They may gradually advance into a respectable degree of consistency, but we expect that to be reached quicker by a coherent survival among the warring elements proposed by the S.S.S., the S.S.B. and the better individual reformers.  Probably there is already more agreement than disagreement among these elements.