the Katharevousa is "the dead branch ..., which has been nailed to the linguistic trunk by willpower alone". The Society soon broke up, over disagreements about which version of demotic to promote. But 'educational demoticism' was now gathering momentum, along with the ground-swell of reform triggered by the humiliation of 1897. Skliros and the Noumas debate In 1907 Georgios Skliros published Our Social Question, the first Marxist manifesto in Greek. He "argued that the ruling class was not willing to listen to the demoticists' message because it wanted to keep people in ignorance. ... Thus, whereas most demoticists had hitherto envisaged reform from above, Skliros promoted revolution from below." This work was significant not just for introducing an element of class warfare into the language question (for the first time) but also for prompting a long and notable debate in the demoticist magazine (1907-1909). This pitted "bourgeois demoticists who believed that reforming the language of Greek education would automatically lead to a liberalization of Greek society" against "socialists who argued that social reform or revolution was a necessary prerequisite for the solution of the language question". But as important as the argument was the language in which it was conducted. Although Skliros' book was in simple Katharevousa, the Noumas debate was published entirely in demotic. The participants spent hardly any time arguing linguistic details; they simply used whichever version of demotic they felt most comfortable writing. This variety proved to be no barrier to communication and the argument was "carried on at a remarkably high level, in both intellectual and personal terms". By the end of the debate it was clear that demotic prose was now a tool quite capable of handling political and historical discussion on any level. Delmouzos and the Volos girls' school In 1908 liberal educationalist introduced the use of demotic as the language of instruction in the newly founded Municipal Girls' High School of Volos and thereby achieved considerable improvement in test scores and pupil satisfaction. Katharevousa was still on the curriculum, but for the first time in a Greek school the girls were encouraged to express themselves freely in written demotic. Reminiscing a few years later, Delmouzos related how the girls moved from a state of ragiadismos (enslavement: a term implying the mentality of subjection to the Turks during the Ottoman period) to "spiritual/intellectual and moral xesklavoma" (liberation). Putting aside Katharevousa, a "mask for the