school, America is to be America, after all." Eyes tense, brilliant, held his. "I'll give you an advice," she went on. "Translate your lecture in plain words like they translate things from Russian into English or English into Russian. If you want your new school to be for the people, so you got to begin by talking in the plain words of the people. You got to feel out your thoughts from the heart and not from the head."

Her words were like bullets that shot through the static security of his traditional past.

"I shall never see the America which is to be," he said as he took her hand in parting; "it will not come in my day. But I have seen its soul like a free wild bird, beating its wings not against bars, but against the skies that the light might come through and reveal the earth to be."

She walked down the corridor and out of the building still under the spell of his presence. "Like a free wild bird! like a free wild bird!" sang in her heart.

She had nearly reached home when she became aware that tears were run

"Sure! I feel I can learn you how to put flesh and blood into your words so that everybody can feel your thoughts close to the heart." The gesticulating hands swam before him like waves of living flame. "Stand before your eyes the people, the dumb, hungry people hungry for knowledge. You got that knowledge. And when you talk in that high-headed lecture language, it's like you threw stones to those who are hungry for bread."

Then they were both silent, lost in their thoughts. There was a new light in her eyes, new strength in her arms and fingers, when she rose to go.

tears of a soul filled to the brimtears of vision and revelation. The glow of the setting sun illuminated the whole earth. She saw the soul beneath the starved, penny-pinched faces of the Ghetto. The raucous voices of the hucksters, the haggling women, the shrill cries of the children

all seemed to blend and fuse into one song of new dawn, of hope, of faith fulfilled.

"After all," she breathed in prayerful gratitude, "it is 'to the stars through difficulties.' A meshugeneh like me, a cook from Rosinsky's Restaurant burning her way up to the president for a friend!"

HEN Cicero, the greatest of Roman orators and statesmen, in 63 B.C. rang for a stenographer, no dainty maid came tripping to his desk with note-book and pencil ready to perpetuate the thoughts of the man whose every word was pondered by the intellectuals of that day. Instead, we can imagine a dignified and scholarly man, sandaled, tunicked, and togaed, coming forward with waxen tablets and styli, the writing-implements of the time, and sitting at his feet to take dictation. But the result was the same. The living words were transfixed for future generations to read and study.

Those who have struggled with the translation of Cæsar's "Commentaries" or Cicero's orations on the conspiracy of Catiline, now that they

know the means by which this form of intellectual inquisition was made possible, will a thousand times wish that shorthand had never been invented.

Startling as it may seem, shorthand was widely used in the time of the Cæsars. Its beginning is a matter of conjecture; its evolution has extended over several centuries.

The first mention of an abbreviated system is in connection with the Roman poet Quintus Ennius, 200 B.C., who used a scheme of eleven hundred signs that he devised for the purpose of writing more swiftly than was possible by the ordinary alphabet. Doubtless some method of abbreviating words was used by the Hebrews, and also by the Persians, several hundred years before Christ, though there is no evidence that shorthand characters or other special symbols were employed.

The first definite and indisputable evidence of the use of shorthand is recorded by Plutarch, who mentions that in the debate on the Catilinian conspiracy in the Roman Senate in 63 B.C. the famous oration of Cicero was reported in shorthand.

The method of shorthand used was invented by Tiro, who was a freedman of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Like many of the slaves of that time, captives of other nations, he was highly educated, and on receiving his freedom from Cicero he adopted two thirds of his master's name and became Marcus Tullius Tiro. He then became Cicero's secretary and confidant.

When one remembers that the shorthand-writers of those days were without paper, pen, pencil, or ink, and possessed only a crude method of shorthand-writing, it is almost incredible that they could report anything. The writing was done on tablets that were covered with a layer of wax. The edges of the wax tablets were raised in order to allow their being closed without injury to the writing. These tablets were fastened together at the corners by wire, thus forming a kind of book. As many as twenty tablets could be so fastened. When the book consisted of two tablets only it was called a diploma, and the official appointments conferring public office were in that form; hence our word "diploma."

The instrument used for writing was a stylus, which was about the size of an ordinary pencil, the point being of ivory or steel, with the other end flattened for the purpose of smoothing the wax after a record had been made, in order that the tablet could be used again. It was with such instruments that Cæsar was stabbed to death.

Tiro must have possessed unusual skill as a shorthand-writer, for Cicero, in writing to a friend when Tiro was absent, complained that his work was delayed because, while he could dictate to Tiro in "periods," he had to dictate to others in "syllables." Cicero himself was a shorthand-writer, but evidently not a skilful one, as he writes to Atticus, "You did not understand what I wrote you concerning the ten deputies, I suppose, because I wrote you in shorthand."

In reporting the Roman Senate, it is said that Tiro stationed about forty shorthand-writers in different parts of the Curia, who wrote down on their tablets what they could. The transcripts were afterward pieced together into connected discourse. Even today, in the reporting in our own Congress, a somewhat similar method is used, except that the writers take notes in relays. It is stated that some of the Roman stenographers were trained to take down the first parts of sentences and others the closing words.

The world is indebted to Tiro and his followers for the transmission to posterity of some of the finest bits of literature and some of the most effective orations of Roman civilization. By the grace of shorthand, we possess the opinions on the immortality of the soul of two of the famous men who lived before the Christian era. When we remember that in the days of Cicero and Cæsar the sayings of the famous intellectuals were passed on almost entirely by word of mouth, and were handed down in the same manner, the part that shorthand played in the preservation of thought was enormous.

A knowledge of the Tironian notes

it. There is little doubt that St. Paul dictated to stenographers his epistles to the Colossians.

The famous preacher Origen (A.D. 185-253) has left on record the statement that he prepared his addresses in shorthand. He did not, however, permit the addresses to be reported until after he was sixty years of age, when he had acquired such skill as an orator that he could be certain that his orations were given in the form he wished. St. Augustine employed ten stenographers. Basil the Great (A.D. 329-379) wrote:

Words have wings, therefore we use

signs so that we can attain in writing the swiftness of speech. But you, oh, youth, must make the signs very carefully and pay attention to an accurate arrangement of them, as through a little mistake a long speech will be disfigured, while by the care of the writer a speech may be correctly repeated.

Pope Gregory the Great (A.D. 590-604), in the dedication to his famous "Homilies," mentions that he had revised them from the stenographic reports. St. Jerome had ten stenographers, four of whom took down his dictation, while six were transcribers who wrote out what the others had taken from dictation. This fact is an illustration of how "efficiency" was highly regarded even at that early time, and that shorthand had reached a commendable degree of accuracy. How many stenographers to-day can read one another's notes?

8 4

Bearing in mind the fact that the Tironian notes consisted of thousands of arbitrary signs for words and phrases, that the famous orator Seneca developed the Tironian notes by five

thousand additional signs of his own invention, and that Bishop Cyprian added many thousands of abbreviations for scriptural terms, one may have some idea of the difficulties with which the students of shorthand in ancient times had to contend. Perhaps these long lists of arbitraries were responsible for the sad fate of Cassianus when teaching shorthand. Cassianus had been a bishop of Brescia, and when he was expelled from his see, he established an academy at Imola, in the Province of Bologna, in which he taught shorthand. It is recorded that his exasperated pupils suddenly surrounded him and stabbed him to death with their styli. There is no explanation as to what they were exasperated about, but I conjecture that he had assigned them a lesson of a thousand extra arbitraries of his own invention. invention. Fortunate indeed is the teacher of modern shorthand whose students are armed only with harmless pencils.

Marcus Aurelius Prudentius, who, in the third century, was the most famous of the Roman Christian poets, expresses regret at the unhappy fate of a shorthand-writer who was reporting a trial in court. The centurion Metellus, having been converted to Christianity, refused to remain a soldier. He was what we should now term "a conscientious objector." When the judge decided the case against him and condemned him to death, the shorthand-writer who had been employed by Metellus flung his tablets at the head of the judge. By order of the judge he was promptly torn to pieces. It was decreed that stenographers who copied the writings of the teachers of heretical doctrines should have their hands "hewn off."