MANUAL OF HANDWRITING
CHAPTER I
WRITING AS IT NOW IS
There are more writers, or shall we say scribblers, in the world at the present moment than at any previous period of its history. But it would appear from all accounts that as the exponents of caligraphy have multiplied, the quality of the writing has deteriorated.
To fully describe and depict writing as it is the wide world over in our civilised age, would require a volume of itself. Suffice it in this chapter to furnish an amount of description, testimony or evidence and illustration, as shall adequately exhibit the existing condition of things in the writing world.
At the beginning of this century the art of penmanship was comparatively little practised. Education being in a sadly neglected condition, there were few facilities for teaching it. Schools—i.e. good schools—were few and far between, trained teachers were unknown, headline copy books had not been dreamt of—copy slips were scarce and difficult to get, and teachers for the most part had to rely solely on their own caligraphic ability, whilst as a natural sequence good writers remained in a mournfully small minority and the numbers of bad writers yearly increased. Gradually however as people woke up to a realisation of the state of affairs specially with reference to the masses and their ignorance of "Reading, Writing and Counting," more attention was directed to these subjects and the headline copy
