is therefore easily straightened, and it is a light matter for the teacher to train him rapidly. All this without

resorting to making the pupil believe that a lesson awaits him which he must recite tomorrow; rather he must make that lesson beloved to him by way of enticement. On this occasion I shall describe a method I followed myself and tested with the girls of the second elementary year, and the result was satisfying — astonishing, even.

The first thing I did was to follow the method of correcting the distorted pronunciations of all the words the little girls might need while in the classroom and on the playground, with their teachers and with their classmates.

Then, once they had the necessary vocabulary at their command, I set about, together with them, assem-bling the words into sentences. That was delightful to the little ones, with no difficulty or twist in it, because it comes as close as can be to the colloquial, and because it opened before them a field for give-and-take that satisfied their disputatious nature.

When I was sure they had absorbed the correct constructions, I began drilling them in writing — that is, in expressing what they wanted and what they did not want. Oh, the scratching of those pencils on the slate boards, and oh, the beauty of those eager faces and shining eyes when they received their first writing lesson!

I read the sweet, naive thoughts, and a tear sprang from my eye — a tear I do not know whether it belonged to this young generation, which I love and for whom I clear the way, or to the language, everything in which enchants me, or to literature, which is the whole of a writer's pleasure in life...?

Yes, I did not know; but I did know that classical Arabic is not what many of its children, and others not its children, boastfully claim. It is not hard of approach like other languages; on the contrary, it is gentle of temper and smoothly obedient. On this basis I went on

building my experiments. I asked my little ones each to prepare a small notebook in which to record her daily diary, and I promised whoever kept up this diary the addition of six marks to her marks assigned for language. I drilled them for some days, then gave them a simple model and left them for some days more; and when I came back to them I found in my hands the likes of these simple samples by girls of six, seven, and eight. Here is one of them:

"Four o'clock in the afternoon. Today I went to school and saw the teacher; she had been away seven days, and I was glad of her, and I said good morning to her, and when I entered the classroom I came up to her, all shy, and said to her, thank God for your safe return."

The second was this:

"Yesterday evening, while I was going home, I found a poor woman in torn clothes with a small child. She stretched out her hand to me asking for alms; my heart softened, and I gave her my pocket money so she could spend it on her son. O Lord, do not let us need people!"

And here is another sample, sent to me by a bright pupil whose illness forced her to leave school for a few days; she saw no harm in sending me her diary, and here it is:

"I am sick. Father told me not to leave my bed, and I obeyed him because I love him very much. Beside me on the table are my sister's toy and some sweets and some pictures. But I do not love any of this now, because I long for school. When will I get well?"

This speech is simple in structure, naive in wording; it comes from the heart of the colloquial; there is not in it one feature of splendid style nor one word of verbal magic. But there is in it that correct expression, and this alone is all we want at the beginning. When the pupil has drunk deep of reading, his faculties will widen and his style be polished, and he will become able to express his thoughts in more eloquent language and sounder exposition without hardship or strain.

Here comes the turn of the Ministry of Education. Upon its shoulders falls a great respon-sibility — responsibility for the language of a people whose history is joined to its own. To strengthen the language, then, it must revise the curricula, giving the language alone half the weekly timetable and leaving the other half to the remaining subjects. It must put at the pupils' disposal numerous libraries to which the pupil may turn whenever he finds spare time for reading, without exacting any price in return; and the employees of those libraries must be in constant touch with whatever good new work in Arabic the presses put out.

The Ministry must also add extra hours to the free hours of the language teacher, so that he can prepare his lessons thoroughly and study each pupil singly, to straighten his language and explain to him what has escaped him in his copybooks or in his diary — so that his explanations do not come off on the instant, like a hint, nor so terse that they are misunderstood.

It must impose hours of conver-sation as an obligation upon all classes, for by conversation the language is set right, and on it depends the pupils' passion for Arabic: from the summary of a book, to a letter to a friend, to a dialogue between pupil and pupil, to a recital of verses of poetry, to a debate between one view and another, and so on through all the strengtheners and endearers there are.

It must also impose the teaching of the Koran as language, not as religion, and at the hands of men of letters, not sheikhs — men of letters in whom the culture of the Koran, its eloquence, and its inim-itability are found in full; for it is to the Koran alone that the credit is owed for preserving the Arabic language, through all these cen-turies, from extinction and eclipse.

As for the government, it is its duty to impose

Arabic upon the foreign insti-tutions with an imposition that