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*The Ladies' Home Journal, April, 1908.

For many centuries after the coming of Christ, blindness, deafness, and mental defects were regarded as the visitations of Providence, to be borne with meekness and fortitude. This old misreading of the message of Christianity still persists in some unhappy minds. There are mothers who object to having an afflicted child taught, lest the more he knows the less resigned he will be to a divine decree. Recently a case came to my knowledge of a devoted parent who kept a deaf girl out of school in order that she might not lose "her beautiful spirit of resignation." The truer Christianity teaches us that disease and ignorance are not ultimate decrees of Heaven, and that such discontent as the first visions of light bring to the yearning soul is a divine discontent. The finest resignation and submission are not incompatible with heroic contest against the forces of darkness. The old idea was to endure. This was succeeded by a better idea, to alleviate and cure. And that, in turn, has given way to the modern idea, to prevent, to root out diseases that destroy the sight, the hearing, the mind, the life and the morals of men. Physicians like Pasteur and Koch, soldiers like Major Walter Reed, and other men of the American Army who gave their lives in a grim war of extermination against disease -- these are the leaders of a new cohort of crusaders who are fighting the true battle of God against the infidel. We know now that hospitals and institutions for defectives are not permanent temples of salvation. They are, rather, like temporary camp-sites along the way upon which the race is journeying toward a city where disease and darkness shall not be.

I have already written about the prevention of unnecessary blindness. We know that much of it can be prevented by simple timely measures. But so long as the laws of health and right living are violated, any mother may have the anguish of seeing her child's beautiful eyes closed to the light forever. Hence, all mothers, nurses, and teachers should have some knowledge of the methods of training blind children. On the American mother the schools for the blind and for the seeing -- depend for support, encouragement, intelligent criticism. Moreover, the work of the schools is helped or thwarted by the care which the children receive before they are old enough to go school.

There are in this country thousands of blind children under school age. Many of them are growing up helpless, untrained, and suffering from want of exercise and play. In order to understand their needs let us imagine what happens when a child loses his sight. He is suddenly shut out from all familiar things, from his games, his studies and the society of other children. The experience and incentive to action that come to us largely through the eye are arrested. The toys that erewhile charmed him with bright colours fall meaningless from his little hands. The picture of tree or bird that he drew in the flush of delight in a newly acquired art is a blank to him.

He runs no more to gaze at the changing scenes of the city street or at the sights of the country that fly thick as driving rain. He has lost a world of stimuli, the free motion and the restless out-reachings of sense which animate us from the earliest years. He ceases to imitate, because he sees nothing to imitate, and imitation is essential to growth. He no longer plays the king, the soldier, the sailor, the giant.

He was but a recipient of life from life of impulses that pushed him to action. He listened to life, he saw it gleam, and every instinct within him felt a stir of might, and, grasping at the clews of sense, embodied itself in his act, his look, his word. This was the natural way of beginning his existence. In those glimpses, those bursts of sound, he grew. They are now withdrawn, and the activity which flooded his being has ebbed away. Small, tottering, bewildered, he must begin life again. A new sense must be developed that shall bring back the stimuli and set aglow again the joy of his heart. The new sense is touch. He must learn to use his hands instead of his eyes. Flung upon a wholly strange world, he must learn to play again, but in the dark; he must grow in the dark, work in the dark, and perhaps die in the dark. We are ready to understand now what must be supplied to him and to the child blind at infancy.

The devices for teaching and amusing a sightless child at home are simple and within the reach of intelligent parents. A blind child should have plenty of objects that he can feel, throw around, hunt for, put in his mouth, if he likes. He will learn their qualities. Touchable qualities are countless; round, flat, smooth, rough, soft and hard, cold and hot, sharp, pointed and blunt, fat, thin, silky, velvety. The elements of beauty, order, form, symmetry, are within his reach. Try to refine his touch, so that he may delight in feeling graceful lines, curves, and motions, and you will thereby refine his mind and tastes.

Encourage him to examine the properties of everything that he can safely touch. He should not, however, be allowed to remain a sedentary investigator, using only the small muscles of his fingers. The wider the range of his explorations the stouter and braver the young navigator will grow. He can go sailing on the wide, wide ocean if he piles up chairs for a ship and hoists a cloth for a sail. A rocking-chair makes a fine locomotive, wherewith to cross continents, but the young engineer should not sit in it; he should push it from behind, that his legs may grow sturdy. Without strength gained from vigorous action he will profit little by the knowledge gained from more delicate activities. There is time enough for these when his legs are weary and he is ready to sit down. Then he can find multifold exercise for his flexible, inquisitive fingers. He can weave tape in and out through the back rods of a chair, cut paper (with blunt-pointed scissors), make chains of spools, beads or daisies. Let him model with clay or putty, put together sliced maps and puzzles. Such play exercises his ingenuity, brings firmness and precision of touch, fosters observation. Teach him to spin tops, for he will find never- ending pleasure in their whirl and hum. I used to love to spin dollars and every other thing that would spin. I remember a set of stone blocks with which I joyed_to build cathedrals, castles, houses, bridges. Finally I asked for a toy city, entire, including churches with steeples, a schoolhouse; a hospital, a square full of trees and houses with steep roofs and plenty of doors and windows. Sometimes I flung all the buildings down, pretending it was an earthquake. Then I dropped apples in the midst of the town and cried, "Vesuvius has erupted!"

The toy-shops, with their wonderful mechanical playthings, their ingenious miniatures of all the furniture of life, will supply apparatus enough for the blind child's home school, and, even if the teacher-mother cannot afford to buy toys, she will find suggestions for homemade ones.

But the toy is merely an adjunct. Child and mother can turn the commonest things, indoors and out, into the materials of play. The all-important object is interesting exercise. Do not let your blind child lie on the bed in the daytime or rest in the corner "out of harm's way." Pull the mattress into the middle of the room, and teach him to turn somersaults on it. Let him cling to your dress or your arm as you go about your work. Even if it inconveniences you, it will teach him to walk steadily and to find his way about the house. Encourage him to run, skip, jump, fly in the swing, and give his playmates a push when they take their turn at swinging. Children are sympathetic and quick to learn. They will lead their blind comrade into their games, especially if they receive the right suggestions from the parents. When the blind child wrestles and plays rough-and-tumble with the other children the unwise mother will run to rescue the afflicted contestant; the wise mother will applaud the struggle so long as it is sportsmanlike and good-natured.

When it is possible, the blind child should be taught to swim and to row. If there is a yard or garden with definite boundaries let him be familiar with every part of it. Furnish him with a sandpile, spade, and shovel; show him how to plant, pick flowers, and water them. Before my teacher came to me I used to hang to my mother's skirt or to my nurse, and I picked strawberries, watered the flowers, turned the ice-cream freezer, folded clothes, and helped the cook pluck the fowl much to the cook's annoyance. This was an ignorant activity, on my part, for I had no language, and therefore no knowledge. How much more is open to the blind child who has learned the language of affection and can be stimulated by the thought that he is "helping mother!" This will develop a love of usefulness, the inspiring sense that he is of service to his family.

It is needful that the mother be ever ready with a suggestion of something new, for the child will tire of doing one thing long. If he is in the country he can feed the poultry, the dog and the cat, shell peas, string beans, peel apples, set the table, wipe dishes, dust, put things in place, and some of these activities are possible in the city, too. That day has been well spent which leaves the blind child in state of healthy fatigue ready to go to sleep. A great many blind persons have insomnia due to nervousness and lack of exercise. Indeed -- and mark this well -- it is not blindness, but the afflictions that accompany it and result from it, that make the blind miserable and inefficient.

The mother who knows that she has it in her power to restore to her blind child almost everything but the mere act of seeing will find in his deprivation, not a calamity to cast her down, but an opportunity to develop her tact, patience, wisdom an object on which to bestow the highest gifts that have been vouchsafed to her.

Laugh and talk with your blind child as you look and smile at your seeing child. Pass his hand lightly over your features and let him feel, not for long, but attentively, the play of facial expression. The face speaks eloquently by unconscious movements of the muscles, as in the smile, the set grave look, the quiver of the lips. Tears, the hot flush of the cheek, the toss of the head, the look downward or upward, are the true indices of mood and emotion. The child will learn these expressions, come in time to imitate them, and thus show an animated face. It is very necessary for the blind child to have a face which speaks to the world of seeing persons in the language which they are accustomed to read in each other's countenances. Without that he will be isolated and misunderstood. People shrink from a blind-looking face and mistake its blankness for want of interest or stupidity. The child's ability to look his thought, appropriate manners, demonstrative gestures, will help him on his way through a world of seeing men. There are many sightless men who try hard and work faithfully, but who lack the accomplishments and amenities of social intercourse. They do not make friends readily and are much alone. Because they seem spiritless they are not invited out, and thus they do become that which they seem; uninteresting, dispirited, uncompanionable. The blind man's opportunities to mingle with his kind depend largely on whether as a child he has learned attractive ways and manners, on whether his mother has laughed with him and sung to him and let him feel with his hands her smile, her frown, her look of surprised delight. The seeing child observes these things unconsciously. To reveal them to the blind child a little conscious effort is necessary.

For, after all, the whole difference between training a blind child and one who sees lies, in a little extra effort. The blind child cannot be deliberately stuffed with information and good morals. Directions must be taught him by indirections. He is a growing human thing, like all the other child-plants in the garden. Only he needs more care. He requires the gardener's best skill. He is to be encouraged, not forced. He can be coaxed, not compelled, to commit poems to memory, to reproduce stories and tell them to his playmates. This should be a pastime and a pleasure, and it will help his progress in composition and reading when he enters school. Throughout life he will find story-telling a welcome diversion for idle hours. Did you ever notice how few seeing people can tell a story? And yet they read so many! Would not a blind man who could tell a story be delightful company by the fireside? The world has not forgotten a blind man who told stories in Greece, centuries ago, or another who sat with closed eyes and read as upon a scroll within his brain the story of creation written anew. The princes and nobles of Japan have heard the wisdom of their ancestors and the history of their country from the eloquent lips of blind men.

There are so many fine and useful things that a blind man can do if he is well brought up, so many disagreeable and debilitating things that he will do if he is left untrained. Like other human beings, he must go forward or he will sink and fall. If his energies are not directed in childhood they will run wild into contortions and perversions. The child not drilled in deportment, not taught to use his hands, will fall into ungainly nervous habits called "blindisms." Left to himself he rocks his body, puts his fingers in his eyes, shakes his hands before his face, sways from one foot to the other, bends forward and back, and develops other uncouth mannerisms. These are frequent among blind children who enter the schools, and the fight to overcome them is much harder than would have been timely discipline at home. In a blind child it is important, first, to beware of bad habits, then to cultivate good ones.

The cultivation of good habits, of right moral and religious ideas, is a delicate and yet natural process. One method that is likely to succeed is to speak the pleasant word of praise at the right moment. Seeing people are subjected to unconscious criticism in the inevitable comparison they make between what they do and what others do. The blind person needs to be told more often and more definitely when he has done well and when he has done ill. Here the parent (and other seeing persons) should guard against the temptation to praise a blind child because he is afflicted. It is harmful, not helpful, to the sightless to be commended for work that is worthless. In this country good people have for years bought cheap beadwork and fancywork from the blind, not because they admired the articles, but because they pitied the makers. This has tended to keep the standard of work low. At present, however, efforts are being made in several States to raise the standard of work and give the blind opportunity to make useful and beautiful things.

It is wonderful what a wise mother can accomplish for her blind child, and the story I shall relate cannot fail to hearten those who have a disaster to right in the lives of their little ones. Dr. F. J. Campbell, who is himself blind, has done more than any other man living for the sightless. He is an American, born in Tennessee, and he founded and has managed for thirty years the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind at Norwood, near London. He is a teacher and an exemplar of independence, self-reliance, and dignified industry for the blind. In vacation time, just to show what the blind can do he has climbed Mont Blanc, and in work- time he has educated and placed in positions of competence some of the best musicians of England. He lost his sight when he was between four and five years of age. At that time there were only two or three schools for the blind in America. His father said to the other members of the family: "Joseph will never see again. He is helpless. We must all work for him and take care of him. As long as he lives he must never want for anything that we can give him. We must wait on him and do everything for him."

The family agreed conscientiously all but the mother. She took her blind son by the hand, led him into another room, and 'said: "Joseph, don't you pay any attention to what you have heard. You can learn to work, and I will teach you. In fact, you've got to work." She did teach him, and saw to it that he did what the other boys did. But what could a blind boy do? Once he suggested that he might chop kindling-wood for the fire. The father was unwilling to trust a blind boy with an axe. But soon he went away on business for a few days. Then the mother took the boy to the woodpile, gave him an axe and set him to work. When the father returned he found six cords of firewood cut and piled. "Well done, lads," he said to the other boys, and then they told him that Joseph had done it all. The father took the hint and bought the boy a new light axe, and from that time taught him all kinds of work about the farm.

Senator Gore, of Oklahoma, was stricken with blindness when he was eleven years old. His father told him that he must go to an institution for the blind. "No, Father," exclaimed the sturdy little lad, "I will go to school for the seeing, right here." They lived then in Mississippi. The boy was page in the State Senate, and boarded at the house of United States Senator George. e So he was brought up in politics and early acquired the love for debating and oratory which led to his success in public life. Mr. Gore's State will not fail to build the fine institution for the blind which some of its citizens are planning, for the welfare of the sightless must be dear to the heart of young Oklahoma, the first American Commonwealth, I believe, to send a blind man to the national Senate.

Doctor Campbell and Senator Gore are men of unusual native power, but their success teaches us surely that ordinary blind children can by careful teaching be fitted for ordinary studies and pursuits. It is significant, I think, that Senator Gore did not go to an institution for the blind, and the question may be raised, though it cannot be easily settled, whether our blind children cannot be taken care of in the ordinary public schools. All the apparatus they need is raised books, raised maps, and a tablet to write on. These can be furnished as well at a regular school as at an institution. The teachers are overworked, it is true, and in the prevailing ignorance about the blind they would expect a blind child to be a difficult burden. But a special teacher could be engaged at less ultimate cost to the community than the cost of existing institutions. The advantage to the blind child would be great. He would be brought up in the midst of seeing children and become a familiar and accepted member of the community in which he must live and work. His presence in the school might have a good effect on popular education by proving that education is a process of mind, and not a matter of apparatus. Solving mathematical problems in his head, he would suggest perhaps to his teachers that arithmetic is an abstraction, and is independent of chalk and blackboard, even of the newest textbook recommended by the school committee.

The reason for the institutions lies in the history of education, not in the essential needs of the blind. Philanthropists saw years ago that blind children were neglected left out of the race entirely. The first thought, naturally, was to bring them together, in a special institution. So one State after another built its school for the blind, and their education remained a mystery to the general public, surrounded, like most institutional education, by myth and superstition. Even now some parents shrink from sending their afflicted children to an "institution," for the very word suggests a prison or asylum. Under present conditions no parent should deprive a blind child of such opportunities as the schools for the blind afford. The children are well treated, they are not coddled, their blindness is not emphasized, and much is done to make them happy.

Whatever the formal schooling of a blind child is to be, his preliminary training and the use he makes of his education depend largely upon his mother. Before he is ready for school she can send to the nearest institution, get an alphabet sheet of embossed characters and teach him his letters. There is the same eagerness for knowledge among blind children as among seeing. Blind boys and girls long to read as their seeing brothers and sisters do. They finger the schoolbooks that the others are studying and feel the blank pages to find the stories that are being read aloud. The first signs of intellectual curiosity will be met by the watchful mother, and she will make her blind child ready for the school that must ere long educate him, ready for the long road of life on which he must set out through the darkness.