Even a people as cultivated as the Chinese have never made the next stride which Sequoyah took. The Chinese still employ the lowest stage of writing in all its absurd prolixity with the result that long years of study and a memory above the average are required for its mastery. This is largely the reason, too, why intellectual democracy is so noticeably absent in China. The Chinese language is too elaborate in structure, too laborious in use, and too inflexible in form to thoroughly saturate China’s teeming millions and to meet the need of a simple, swift, and lucid communication of thought. Our alphabet, on the other hand, answers these requirements. “It is because the Egyptians passed into the glory of the true alphabet that the Phoenicians simplified and improved it, and that the Greeks were able to transmit it to occidental civilization that western nations have been able to make such tremendous mental progress and established such a wide and common knowledge.” It is quite obvious that Sequoyah was not blundering when he discarded his pictograph system if he would achieve his ideal. After long and patient study he began a search for the unity of speech. At length he discovered that _sound_ was the key in the construction of language. Then by attentive listening for another period he discovered that the sounds in the words spoken by the Cherokees could be analyzed and classified and could be represented by hardly more than a hundred syllables. Further analysis revealed two distinct types of sounds, vowels and consonants. Classifying the sounds according to this division, he found that there were six vowel and seventy-two consonant sounds. Thirty-seven sounds still remained unclassified. By dint of further analysis he found that these were of a hissing or guttural nature. In an ingenious way he represented the former by seven combinations and the latter by one. As a result, in this expeditious manner he was able to write a copious language vastly wealthier in its vocabulary than ours, with but eighty-five characters. The best authorities are agreed that our alphabet is, in some respects, the greatest invention of the human mind. Yet it is not the product of a single mind, but the accretion of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek wisdom extending over a period of at least three thousand years. Excellent as our alphabet is, it fails to outrank that of Sequoyah in point of felicity and ease of mastery. Ours is superior in that it goes to the unit of speech, _sound_, and has characters that stand for sound. Sequoyah’s alphabet had characters that stood for combinations of sounds or syllables. Our alphabet is the only sound-for-a-sign system of writing yet invented. It is an alphabet of letters, while that of Sequoyah was an alphabet of syllables. James Mooney claims that it ranks second to all systems of writing ever known to the world. It certainly could not have been the work of other than a gigantic intellect.