When should and would are used as true past tenses for shall and will (that is, when they express either mere futurity or a definite determination in some past time) they follow the same order for the three belongs to shall and will, as

I feared I should fall.

I hoped you would succeed.

persons that

I expected that he would have it.

But if a hypothetical or subjunctive idea is to be introduced should becomes the preferred auxiliary, thus

If I should.
If you should.
If he should.

Yet the principles of euphemism or of courtesy that can modify the choice of shall and will (leading us to avoid needless egoism in the first person as well as needless compulsion in the second and third)—while they affect also the choice of should and would, are felt to be less strenuous in their application to these derived forms. Thus "I thought I would fall," while held to be incorrect by a person of keen grammatical sense, carries less of emphasis on the unintended idea of willing than is given by "I will fall." For this reason many persons, in expressing actions which may be the result of a degree of volition (though without intending to lay special emphasis on this idea) use would where others prefer should, as "I thought I would (or should) go to Boston before the end of the season.

Should, in the sense of ought is used for all three persons, as

I know I should do it.

I think you should do it.

He should do it, but he may not.

In such cases the word is often emphasized.

Although these principles seem complex, the number of cases in which native-born users of English can go grammatically wrong is not numerous. Whenever a sense of obligation or of compulsion is to be made prominent, one naturally uses should, and if volition is to be emphasized, would is used intuitively.

If one can learn to use "I should,” “we should,” in those instances when it is not desirable to lay emphasis on one's own volitions, he can scarcely make a serious grammatical error. It is true that there remains a large area of cases in which certain persons use should and others would, (as in the second person of questions, "Should you like to go ?" "Would you like to go?") but the difference is not so much due to disregard of grammatical principle as to a difference in people's preferences on the question of hiding or obtruding the slight element of volition that is involved. If an action is voluntary at the moment the speaker must be allowed a certain degree of choice in the matter of bringing this volition into notice.

So long as even the "native born" are not entirely agreed as to the idiomatic use of these four auxiliaries it is not strange that for foreign students of English the difficulties go deeper. The mistakes made by

foreigners often remind us of the merry tale of the Frenchman who declared, "I will drown; nobody shall help me." Yet the absurdity lies not so much in the blundering use of the English idiom as in the inconsistencies of the language itself which lead to this confusion.

It is impossible for the ordinary grammar text-book to deal with these four auxiliaries exhaustively. One English writer, Sir E. W. Head, has written an entire book on the subject of "Shall and Will." Yet the important points can easily be mastered and applied by one who has a sense of grammatical idiom and will give the matter discriminating attention.

A good exercise for grammar students consists in searching for these words in literature and interpreting their use by the original meaning of the words and the historic changes in their application.

A suggestive quotation on the subject may be taken from the writings of Richard Grant White, who says: "I do not know in English literature another passage in which the distinction between shall and will, and would and should, is at once so elegantly, so variously, so precisely, and so compactly illustrated as in the following lines from a song in Sir George Etheridge's She Would if She Could (1704).

"How long I shall love him I can no more tell
Than had I a fever when I should be well.

My passion shall kill me before I will show it,
And yet I would give all the world did he know it.
But oh, how I sigh, when I think, should he woo me
I cannot refuse what I know would undo me."

THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD*

"The subjunctive is not a simple mood, but a composite form, the wreck of two moods."

In English the distinctions between thought forms and fact forms are to a great extent levelled.-SWEET.

Just how rare this usage now is may be seen from the fact that in ten representative volumes by recent writers of high reputation, containing approximately 900,000 words, there are said to be only 269 instances of the subjunctive use of the verb be and only fifteen instances of the subjunctive of any other verb than be.-FROM The Author. London, 1897.

The same feeling of doubt or indeterminateness that characterizes the subjunctive is often conveyed to the form now assigned to the indicative. The conditional force in the two differs in degree rather than in kind.—SOUTHWORTH.

The subjunctive mood has so nearly died out of every-day English that it becomes a questionable and hazardous proceeding to give to the subjunctive idea a distinct metaphysical existence, and then to use this fictitious entity to conjure with.-TOLMAN.

If we lose the subjunctive verb it will certainly be a grievous impoverishment to our living language, were it only for its value in giving variation to diction, and I make bold to assert that the writer who helps to keep it up deserves public gratitude.-JOHN EARLE,

The discriminating use of the subjunctive lends a grace and delicacy to the expression of thought, of which the most finished writers of to-day gladly avail themselves.-SOUTH

WORTH.

*Allen's School Grammar (Heath and Co.) gives a full treatment of the uses of the subjunctive mood.

"The poet will not relinquish the subjunctive mood. He knows its value too well."

It is not many years since text-books in grammar conjugated the subjunctive mood like the indicative. with the conjunction if prefixed. These older grammars also added a subjunctive form, but the student was left to infer that the essence of the subjunctive mood lay somehow in a conjunction.

No text-book or teacher in good standing to-day would endorse this absurdity. In the treatment of the subject at present, many grammars lay chief emphasis upon the fact that the subjunctive mood is seldom heard in modern English. Both teacher and textbook sometimes say virtually to the young student, "The subjunctive mood is so nearly obsolete that it is scarcely worth our while to consider it."

Yet the subjunctive were is still a required form of the English language. It is used to express a pure hypothesis that is known to be contrary to facts, as

Would that he were here.

If I were a Frenchman (I am not) I might think differently.

Another subjunctive form that is less common than were, but is not going out of use, is the present subjunctive be in the hypothesis of a scientific demonstration. Our text-books still say:

"If the triangle A be superimposed on the triangle B," etc., and "If a pendulum be drawn to one side it will swing to the other."

The verb be has another old subjunctive form, wert