How the Blind are Educated.
By Edward Salmon.
OW many of the thousands who go every year to the Crystal Palace remember, or even know, that hard by is an institution which should claim the support of all who have hearts to feel for the afflictions of their fellows? Perhaps if some of us, on pleasure bent, knew as much of the workings of the Royal Normal College for the Blind as we do of the neighbouring giant palace of glass, we should appreciate the blessing of sight at a truer value. It is to be feared that few who go through life noting its facts, observing the beauties of Nature, regarding the faces of those they love, and transacting their private business without help from other people's eyes, give the thought they ought to the precious nature of the vision they boast, however limited it may be. Still fewer are they who take the trouble to inquire what is being done for those who share not the glories of God's light. Yet to be plunged in a lifelong darkness; to be doomed, whilst breath lasts to a constant round of blind man's buff; to be able to walk, but not to see where one is going; to be able to talk, but not to know, by the expression of another's face, whether one's remarks are welcomed or not; to be able to listen, and not to watch the speaker—in a word, to be robbed of half life's joys, is surely a fate which should command sympathy, prompt, practical, and universal.
The writer of this paper has, during the last twelve or thirteen years, been more or less intimately associated with the blind. Nothing ever strikes him as more extraordinary than the genuine happiness of most of them. What ought, it would seem, to have proved a crushing blow, has apparently had little or no effect on the brightness of their lives. Nor does the infirmity prove any great bar to their independence. Think of, among many others, Milton undertaking his "Paradise Lost," his history of England, and his Latin dictionary after he became blind; of Philip Bourke Marston—whose sorrows were not primarily due to his affliction—mastering the typewriter, so that he could communicate with his friends and produce his poems without the aid of an amanuensis; of Henry Fawcett, who refused to allow the accident which cost him his sight, to change his life, and who not only kept up his riding and his fishing, but won his way to Cabinet rank. To men like Mr. Fawcett, no doubt the possession of a life's partner means much, and indeed ample material exists for an interesting article on the wives of blind men, who have been to them what Francis Huber's was to him—"A good pair of eyes, a right hand in all his troubles, and a light for his darkest days."
We are, however, not now concerned with blind men but with blind boys and girls, and with those especially who are
