At present the situation of the English working classes is in this respect, pathetic in its helpless and infantile humility. Their talk is the babble of babes, their vocabulary the means of expression for creatures whose feelings and thoughts are no more complicated than those of primitive savages. Not only are they incapable of understanding complex states of feeling or complex thoughts when they hear them accurately and carefully expressed, but they are also utterly unable to give expression to at least three-quarters of their own thoughts and emotions. [p133] In regard to a very large number of thoughts and emotions, which, to the cultivated man, are commonplace matters, the masses of England are therefore literally inarticulate. The same word answers for a hundred meanings in their conversation, all of which it but inadequately expresses; while for those emotions and thoughts for which they have no words, there can exist only mute and mystified suspicion. This is bad enough. Life is sufficiently tragic for millions of creatures to-day, without its being either necessary or desirable to aggravate it with the additional affliction of dumbness. And yet the fact that this inarticulateness, which ignorance imposes, is equivalent to dumbness, or at least to partial dumbness, is surely incontestable. But there is a consequence of this ignorance which is even more serious than that discussed above. And that is the danger to which it exposes its sufferers of falling under false guidance, misdirection and pollution from outside. Whereas dumbness, although a sad affliction, is often merely another form of constraint; misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or the inability to criticise and to reject the expressed thoughts of others, may be a source of pollution, a source of grave error, and a speedy means of complete and incurable perversion. If people are to be protected from misconceptions, false leaders, demagogues, and all those smart and slippery unemployed who are ever ready to exploit ignorance, and take advantage of simplicity, they must be in a position to listen critically to an address or an appeal made to them in their [p134] own language. They must be in a position to tell to what extent their proposed leader or misleader understands what he is talking about. How much false sentiment, false doctrine, inflammatory teaching, is simply an abuse of language, a forcing of terms, in fact, catachresis! How much of it would be detected and exposed, if the majority of the nation possessed that precision and understanding in the use of words, which would come with a proper knowledge of their native tongue.