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SEVERAL laudable attempts to start industrial work for the blind of New York were stopped through ignorant opposition and lack of efficient interest and support. In 1904 a commission was appointed in New York to inquire into the condition of the blind of the state. The public was so indifferent to its vital work that they permitted it to be interrupted and stopped. Until this year an amazing ignorance of the condition of the blind in the Empire State still prevailed.

The state of New York pays annually $99,000 for the education of about 300 blind children and $1,000 to the State Library at Albany. There are also two libraries in Greater New York which are growing by the labors of their zealous librarians, but which are handicapped by the type problem. Private beneficence maintains several homes suitable for the aged and infirm blind, but were it is unjust to place strong, capable, young blind persons. There is also one private, small, but admirable working home for blind men in Brooklyn.

The city of New York gives pensions of about fifty dollars annually to those adult blind who have no other means of support. But otherwise, outside o the almshouse, the state of New York does not appropriate one dollar to help the three-fourths of the entire number of the blind, who are those who lose their sight after school age.

In New York many of this class of intelligent and capable human beings are worse than slaves; forced into inactivity in their poverty, or into that inactivity which brought poverty and despair. What effort had been made to help them had failed. The law did not permit a blind man to beg, neither could he steal. Unless he was a capitalist, or willing to be dependent on his friends, the almshouse was his only future. So for these people the New York Association for the blind was founded.

In an article in the World's Work of August, Miss Helen Keller has told about the origin of the Association. It is sufficient for you to know that it started in an effort to give pleasure to the blind by offering to suitable blind individuals the opportunity to use the unsold theater and concerts tickets, which were given by the managers of theaters and musical enterprises to a committee. The plan worked admirably, so that now the original ticket bureau is the proud parent of seven others, the latest having been opened in Switzerland. Five thousand tickets have gone out from the first bureau, and there has never been any compliant of the use of them. The originators of the plan quickly recognized that the radical necessity of the blind was not pleasure, but opportunity to work; the result was the formation of the New York Association for the Blind, which was incorporated in 1906.

Our first work was to take stock of the people we wished to help. As a private association we began the census of the blind of the state of New York, and continued it to its completion for the New York State Commission for the Blind of 1906, which appointed the recording secretary of the Association, Miss Edith Holt, director of the census. This work she voluntarily undertook and carried out in the office of the Association, where she is now completing the tabulation of the statistics. We are glad that we have no less authority than the head statistician of Columbia University to tell us that our census of the blind just taken s a step in advance of the best work of the kind which had been done before we raised the standard of what personal detailed censuses could be. This work could not have been accomplished and the Second Commission for the Blind of New York might have been forced to suspend operations as the first one did if the New York Association had not been able, fortunately, to lend $6,000 to the commission to complete its task and also to give it its head office free of expense and a volunteer director.

We reported 9,585 cases, which we had gathered from the Federal census, the city pension lists, the New York State Commission in 1904, prisons, organized charities, hospitals, and other institutions throughout the state, followed by personal visitation by the census enumerators, of whom six were blind. Many of the listed blind had gone to a better land. Some of them, if we are to judge by their addresses, must have been amphibians, living in the Hudson River or existing in airships, which in this day, of course, is not impossible.

Our statistics, which will appear in the commission's report to the governor, were taken from 5,308 cases. We are still discovering more blind people, and estimate that the entire number of the blind in the state is about 6,200. We have a registration bureau, containing the 9,585 reported and detailed cases of 5,900 blind people, and all additional information concerning the blind which we can obtain. We have, also, catalogues containing, as far as possible, particulars of institutions and associations and literature for the blind, as well as an employment catalogue, showing professions and needs of the blind in the state; also a small reference library.

Our next work relates to the prevention of unnecessary blindness. As we have at this convention some of the greatest workers in this field. I need not go into this question in detail. We wish to assist in every way to help to stamp out the scourge of infant ophthalmia, to prevent the shocking loss of eyesight not only from this unnecessary evil, but also from the lack of safety devices in manufactories, glass works, blasting, etc.

We distribute information and instruction for the prevention of infantile blindness. We have an able oculist who gives his services and is active in preserving and recovering any possible vision for our blind people.

Among our friendly visitors is a trained nurse, who is interested in caring for the dismissed patients from hospitals and other blind people in need of her help. We have a zealous doctor, who, in collaboration with our oculist, makes physical examinations required before workmen are admitted to our shop. In this shop for blind men they are instructed in broom making and chair caning and carry on these trades. We are anxious to extend the field for their work as rapidly and in as many directions as seems prudent and useful. Our constant effort is to find occupations suited to the capacity of the individual.

Perhaps the moral effect of giving blind men a chance to work is amongst the most gratifying results of the workshop. We hope ultimately to have a shop for blind women. At present they are mostly beginners, to whom we are teaching industries in our classes or at their homes.

We give out raw material to the women in their homes, where the home teachers instruct them in making marketable articles which we later sell for them. Our home teaching has thus far been entirely done by blind people. We believe that it is better done by them than it could possibly be by sighted people. The chief reason for this is the bond of sympathy in the common handicap of both pupil and teacher.

With our sighted cooperators and our bind teachers we are able to give instruction in music, reading, writing, typewriting, typewriting form phonographs, telephone switchboard operating, stenography, sewing by machine and hand, knitting, crocheting, basket and lace making, and beadwork.

Giving occupations and developing industry are only parts of our work. We believe in encouraging the normal life for our blind in their homes. We do not want them segregated and treated as a class by themselves. We are mapping out Greater New York in districts, so that our friendly visitors can cover the whole territory and so know and follow the home conditions of each blind person whom we want to help, and whom we want to have help us. At times we perform unofficially various services. We have been known to distribute food and clothes. We have placed blind people in hospitals and helped to bury them.

We have a Blind Men's Self-Improvement Club, which has a great field of usefulness. The president of this club is an able and generous cooperator of ours. Besides the blind, the club numbers many sighted associate members; among them people of broad interest and culture, who are helped as much as they help by their exchange of ideas with the blind. The club also acts as a tremendous stimulus to the blind man, putting heart in him through the example of successful men similarly affected whom he meets and hears talk there. It also gives the fortunate blind men a chance for service to the less fortunate, for which they are preeminently fitted.

The Woman's Club of the New York Association for the Blind is run on much the same plan as the Men's. It has also sighted associate members. Through all the officers of the Men's Club are blind, the women have elected two honorary sighted officers.

We recognize happiness and diversion as an essential part of the life of our blind people. Most of new organizations for the help of the blind have tried to give them an opportunity for simply wage earning. It has been left largely for our young Association to emphasize the great importance of pleasure and beauty in educational work for the adult blind, and to recognize that not only are they good, but essential for the best results. With this in mind, our original effort, the ticket bureau, is still an important and vital part of our work. Our blind man will cane better chairs if he occasionally hears an amusing play. Our blind woman will make more exquisite and more marketable things if she has the sound of beautiful music in her memory as she works.

We have never regretted for a moment the amount we have expended in printing and postage and personal effort to make our Ticket Bureaus successes. They have been splendid introductions to the blind, and have had great effect in bringing them into friendly relations with their neighbors. A blind person is given an extra ticket for his guide. This helps him at once to become a social center instead of a social exile. At last he is not asking for something, but he has something to give. Often those who are socially and educationally more fortunate than he will in this way become interested in him, with a lasting benefit to both.

We encourage outings and games, and are soon to try dancing and skating. In fact, our men have been clamoring for some time for a dance. We are careful in our work and play to keep the blind men and blind women apart, though we have no objection to their sighted friends of both sexes being with them. Through the cooperation of the flower mission our home teachers have been able to distribute many flowers to the blind in the tenements, where they brought much pleasure into cheerless lives.

All the officers of our Association have given their services voluntarily. One of them especially has worked very hard. I would like to make particular mention of the superintendent of our workshop. The blind men were clamoring for work, but we could not find a superintendent who would make the thing a success, when Mr. Morford offered his services. In ten days the shop was in full blast. There is still a tradition that Mr. Morford makes a great deal of money out of it. I have never yet been able to find out how much Mr. Morford takes out of his own pocket for the Association. But I do know that nothing goes into his pockets from it.

One of our most useful activities is keeping at our office reading and writing appliances and inventions which have been found of help to the blind, and having their use intelligently explained. Our idea is to be an accessible information bureau and depot of supplies for the blind, and their middle man and friend. We are glad to take orders for anything from a Bible to a pack of cards; from a printing machine to a self-threading needle.

Many friends and relatives of the blind come to us utterly ignorant of what can be done to make their lives more bearable. Light through work is our motto. It is a good one. What we were laughed at for believing a year ago, we have proved, and other organizations and communities are looking for the light which we have found.

When I asked the head of our telephone company to give a switchboard for blind people to practice on, he thought I was crazy. That was a year ago. Doubting my sanity, and solely to get rid of me, he ordered the switchboard installed, asking whether I preferred mahogany or cherry. I said cherry would do, as we were young I had the pleasure of writing him the other day, asking for the installation of a switchboard at our new office, and told him that there were now in the city of New York five blind switchboard operators -- two in hospitals, in positions of great responsibility, where they have the ambulance calls and other emergency work; two in business houses, and one in the editorial rooms of a great New York daily paper. The most encouraging part of the switchboard work is that two of the present employers of our blind pupils have suggested that they would like each to employ another blind person in their offices.

One of the most difficult classes for us to give light to is what one of our blind cooperators calls the blind sighted public. We try to teach the blind sighted public by propaganda, and by our little museum where we show examples of the best work created by the blind. Here are two beautiful bronzes made by the blind sculptor, Vidal. These are, indeed, eye-openers -- exquisite sculpture done by a blind man who was worthy pupil of Baryé.

Recently, largely through the exertions of our vice-president and his wife, I was enabled to light the light of lighthouse No. 2, to give light through work to the blind in Buffalo. The blind were very helpful themselves in starting our first branch. I found in the almshouse in Buffalo a number of blind people. One man had been a bridge builder and had bossed gangs of workmen. The message which he sent to the business men of Buffalo who doubted the necessity of an organization for the blind was, perhaps, the final word which started one there. "Tell them," said he, "that if a hard-working, proud man, who has bossed gangs of men and helped to build bridges, loses his sight and is sent to the almshouse to rot he will go mad. Tell them that if they will give me a chance to work I will work now." He is working now!

Perhaps our Association can do most good when it is realized from what a very little acorn our oak sprang. All of our present activities emanated from one ordinary and not large private house in New York; in library which is eighteen feet by ten. The head office of the Association is still there. There the original switchboard was installed, and in this same room (eighteen by ten) our blind people have been taught typewriting; our classes have assembled; orders are taken for work, and we have often counted over twenty people busily employed here at once. The workshop started in a loft in a business building. One of our blind home teachers has received regularly the largest classes of women at her home. The State Census of the Blind, of which our experts have said such complimentary things, is still lodged in my studio, in this same house, where busts and clay tubs are decently shrouded in unbleached muslin, until we take possession of our new office building. We started on a capital of $400 from the ticket bureau. We depend entirely on voluntary gifts. Our census work, of course, was helped by the state.

I have mentioned these things because I wish to emphasize that there isn't anybody here who could not probably beg, borrow, or steal a library, or even a bedroom or a barn, in which to start an organization such as ours. There is probably no community in the country large enough to justify an association for the blind where $400 could not be found to start one.

A great drawback to the ease with which our work might be accomplished is the blind graduate who has been inefficiently trained at school. We have such, who have all kinds of honor marks in Greek, Latin, music, theory, etc., but who cannot speak an English sentence without a grammatical error or even keep personally clean. We have others who profess to be tuners, but who are too fond of us to tune the Association's pianos lest they hurt them. There are other graduates, notably from Overbrook, Perkins, and Batavia, who have been so well taught that we only wish that they could become our teachers and cooperators. The school does not do its duty unless the greatest number of graduates are efficient advocates and examples of the capacity of the blind, unless they have strong bodies which make it possible for them to make the most of their brains and hands. Though our blind may lose their sight after the school age, every efficient blind person who has learned how to be blind under a sympathetic and capable corps of teachers, who has been adequately prepared physically and mentally to take his place in the world, is a beacon light of encouragement to the other blind in their darkness, ignorance, or helplessness.

The after care of the blind when he has left school is a serious problem, but one which at last we are all beginning to recognize. The duty of the community to provide for the aged and infirm blind has been one which it has dealt with to some extent, and the results, like the curate's egg, have been good in spots.

We have long recognized the right of every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The time has come now when modern justice should make this possible for our indigent blind. Life in the almshouse cannot truly be called life for an intelligent, ambitious man or woman who loses sight in the fullness of strength, and who wishes to turn that strength again into a useful channel. Liberty is not possible for the poor blind unless we teach them to work, and do not force them to accept charity, to beg, or to steal. The pursuit of happiness is not possible without opportunity. Therefore, our Republic does not fulfill the modern conception of liberty for all; our humanity is incomplete as long as we do not prevent all possible blindness, give every unavoidably blind child, every blind man, and every blind woman a chance -- a chance to do their best, despite their handicap, to develop that capacity which God has given them.