versity and Epworth League Settlements that are now being established in many American cities, and that are accomplishing great results among the neglected classes. Doubtless the missionaries would find in some instances at the end of the year that their salaries would be scaled down, but many a pastor on the frontier and even in older portions of the home country finds at the end of the Conference year that his meager salary is scaled down by not being paid in full, and he must bear the loss. Missionaries in foreign fields would be willing to do the same thing if it should be found that the exigencies of the work demanded it.

2. It would appeal to the benevolent and self-sacrificing spirit in the home churches. Under our present plan it is known to all that the missionaries will receive their stipulated salaries, whatever may be the deficit in the treasury. If the missionaries show their willingness to trust the Church for a support the sense of obligation to respond will be greatly increased. Besides, this policy will appeal to all ministers and officials in the home Church, who will feel under obligation to share with the missionaries who are at the front on the foreign field. We believe this plan would double our missionary force on the field, and would also double our income in a single decade and save the Missionary Society from ever again being burdened with debt. The Church would be made to feel that it is responsible for the support of the missionaries sent to the field, and a new inspiration to larger benevolent contributions would everywhere prevail.

3. It would appeal to the missionaries now on the field, most of whom, if not all, would heartily fall into line and share if need be the necessary sacrifice. Besides, this policy would greatly simplify financial methods. Knowing that no more could be expended in any one year than the Church would contribute, the estimates from the missions, home and foreign, would be made upon a conservative basis. It would be the duty of the General Committee to compare these estimates, equalize them as far as possible, and determine the maximum sums for the Missions and Conferences respectively, home and foreign. As the year passed the remittances would be sent out monthly or quarterly upon conservative estimates

of the probable income. On the 31st day of October, which closes our fiscal year, it could be readily determined as to the balances available for each Conference and Mission for the entire missionary year, which corresponds to the calendar year, while unforeseen emergencies would be met by the Board of Managers of the Missionary Society, as they are under our present system.

If the plan herein proposed is not practicable let somebody suggest a better one. That something should be done to quicken the missionary movements of the Church is clear to all who have given special thought to the present situation. It is plain that the pressing demands of our work in the foreign field are far beyond the supply now afforded. It is not a question of making converts. Multiplied thousands are ready to come, but our missionary force now at the front cannot receive and train them. A native presiding elder in India has recently caused a sensation by saying that he could baptize and receive within the bounds of his own district fifty thousand people in one year, if he had the means to care for them. We have reached a point where we dare not say to the heathen, “Come, for all things are ready," "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation," but rather do we wait for a more "convenient season." The Lord is saying to us, "Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages." But, alas, though the harvest is plenteous, the reapers are few. It is time for us to pray the "Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth [more] laborers into his harvest," and then plan as though we expect our prayers to be answered.

Let there be a thorough discussion of our present methods of missionary administration, not in a spirit of captiousness or fault-finding, but of earnest desire to ascertain what changes, if any, should be made to meet the demands of the new missionary era that is now dawning upon the world.

ABLeonard

28-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XIV.

ART. VII.-THE TRIUMPH OF JARGON.

WHAT is called "dialect" seems to be increasing every day in our literature, especially in fiction and verse; nor does popular liking for it show any notable diminution, although it has been unsparingly assailed by many critics of high standing. But curiously enough springs up the fact that in the United States there is no such thing as a dialect of the English language; we have not even a well-defined AmericanEnglish patois. Furthermore, there is not an argot peculiarly our own, not a jargon that we may reduce to written form and claim as the outgrowth of conditions exclusively American operating upon a class of our English-speaking citizens. In Louisiana and southern Mississippi a class of negroes, with a few whites added, speak a French "gombo," or mongrel patois; but it is not a dialect. Some scholarly trouble has been taken by investigators, among whom Professor Alcée Fortier, of Tulane University, New Orleans, deserves most distinguished notice, to reduce this "gombo" French to some sort of literary form; but none of the native, original speakers of it has ever made it into literature. It is, in fact, a jargon of French, Spanish, Italian, and English, irregularly formed and variously spoken by abjectly ignorant people, with blood in their veins as hopelessly mixed as the forms of their speech.

We see much about the "Hoosier" dialect of Indiana, the State in which the writer was born and in which he has spent the larger part of his life. After years of loving and patient study, based upon intimate familiarity with the people, he must say that the vulgar speech of the unlettered Indiana people differs in no essential or general feature from that of Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, or Kansas. As a matter of fact there is no "Hoosier" dialect. A marked difference, however, does exist between the intonation and pronunciation heard in the Southern States and the intonation and pronunciation heard in the Northern States. But nothing like an English dialect is discoverable in either section. In Indiana, for example, the population is mainly descended from New Englanders and Southerners, so that wherever we find illiterate

people of old Indiana stock they disclose their ancestry by certain Yankeeisins of speech, or certain peculiarities traceable to Virginia or Kentucky or some other Southern source. If conditions otherwhere in our country have been favorable to the evolution of a dialect Indiana certainly has not been a possible area for such a linguistic growth.

In various regions of the Southern mountains a picturesque, yet by no means uniform, preservation of the illiterate colonists' peculiarities of language is notable. Forms of phrases, obsolete or obsolescent words, old folklore sayings from the English peasantry of two hundred years ago linger in the talk of genuine Virginia, Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee mountaineers. But the writer has ranged these mountains, has lived as a mountaineer, and knows the people of the Blue Ridge, the Cumberlands, and Sand Mountain as familiarly as he knows Indianians, and he must say that no mountain dialect exists among them. In one mountain valley or pocket they will pronounce chair "cheer," in another valley or pocket they will pronounce it "cher," in another "chayer," to rhyme with "gayer." The same variances attach to nearly or quite all of the mountain peculiarities. You can safely expect peculiarities of speech in every part of the mountains, but no peculiarity is uniform or persistent. The same may be said of the so-called "cracker" dialect. In the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi the piny woods people who are illiterate have badges of speech which betray their “cracker” origin; but they do not speak a dialect, and from neighborhood to neighborhood they are as variably inconsistent in their phrasing and pronunciation as the mountaineers. In fact, they have very many speech characteristics in common with their highland countrymen, the natural preservation of tongue traits caught from a common peasant ancestry. Isolation and illiteracy have been the preservers of old forms, sayings, and peasant traits; for illiteracy presents waste of effete language substance and at the same time retards the acquisition of new ideas, words, and turns of expression.

Professional littérateurs, especially critics who set up to teach the people in matters of art and literary culture, are culpably at fault when they speak of a "Hoosier" dialect,

Scholars of the

In France there

a mountain dialect, or a "cracker" dialect. Old World do not fall into such an error. are variations of language confined to certain areas, and these variations come very much nearer being dialects than anything that we have. Indeed, the Provençal is a language with a very beautiful literature of its own, a sort of connecting link between modern French and ancient Latin-French idioms. Its peculiarities take every possible form in shading off into French as spoken in Paris, and the little group of modern Provençal writers have a hard time keeping within the limits of their chosen literary area. In the fifteenth century Francis Villon, a poet of extraordinary genius, wrote some ballads in a French jargon, current among thieves, cut-purses, and gutter outlaws, which ballads are touched with the same fine power that has rendered his French poems immortal. We speak of Villon's achievements in the jargon jobelin, as his thief's language has been named, to keep in mind the fact that so-called dialect has had its fascination for genius ever since the dawn of the new learning in Europe. But there is scarcely a resemblance between this cult and the devotion given by Theocritus to his Doric dialect, or by Sappho to her Æolian. One is a mere experiment in the use of the debased forms to which ignorance and vicious usage have reduced a noble language, the other is the splendid natural operation by which a perfect language becomes perfect literature.

It is curiously apparent in our literature at present that the impulse toward the expression of illiteracy has its origin in some explicable, and perhaps excusable, human aspiration. When Bret Harte struck the vein of "dialect" in his "Heathen Chinee" and "Luck of Roaring Camp" the ore that he brought forth seemed to fill a need of the day, and ever since then men have been busy-nay, women, too—staking out and working claims in the same field. It is true that Lowell had written the "Bigelow Papars" long before Harte's star arose ; but Lowell's mind was upon politics, and he made his illiterate man speak, not for himself, but for Lowell and his political poetry. Harte reversed all that. George W. Cable saw the use that might be made, not of the Louisiana patois, but of the lisping and mincing English of the French creoles. He