Ealing College receives only the children of parents who can afford to pay a first-class price for first-class attention and first-class results. How fare the afflicted when their lot is cast less pleasantly? What of the thousands of children of poor but deserving, as well as of pauper, parents brought into the world deprived; so to speak, of their ears? The institution referred to at the beginning of this paper as the only public one in existence at the beginning of this century is the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb founded just one hundred years ago, in Bermondsey, and subsequently removed to the Old Kent-road, where it has now a splendid home. In the course of this year the centenary of the Asylum will be publicly celebrated, and much will, no doubt, be published descriptive of its great and good work. The institution was from the first a success, and since its commencement 2,000 deaf and dumb children have been received and educated by it, some 2,000 having been apprenticed to trades, at a cost of about £18,500. As the Asylum grew, it was deemed wise to establish a branch at the seaside, and if the philanthropists who inaugurated it with half a dozen inmates in 1792 could see the outcome of their work in two imposing institutions—once in the Old Kent-road, the other at the south-east corner of Margate, they would have cause to feel that then lives had not been spent in vain. The children, who are born of poor parents—grooms, gardeners, carpenters, carmen, working men of all kinds, are sent for a year to the Old Kent-road, and are then drafted to Margate, where, in addition to receiving the best education which a large school can supply, they receive also the health which is to be found on the North Kent coast, if anywhere. The Asylum is in charge of Dr. Elliott, to whose skill as a photographer we are indebted for several of our pictures. Dr. Elliott was one of the distinguished body of men who at first found it difficult to believe that there was anything in teaching by the oral system worth the time and trouble it involves. Experience has convinced him, as it has convinced others, that he was wrong, and, within the limits rigidly prescribed by opportunity and nature, he supports the education of the deaf on the German system. There are at Margate 300 children, of whom all except eighty are being trained to speak and to lip read. Fresh from Ealing as I was, I appreciated instantly the difficulties which beset Dr. Elliott. At Ealing each child can receive individual attention. At the Margate Asylum and similar institutions they are of necessity taught in classes of perhaps a dozen. The wonder is that under such circumstances they ever learn to articulate or to lip read at all. They do, however, and some of the results are quite remarkable. Several children to whom I spoke understood what I said without apparent difficulty, and some had voices so pleasant that I wondered whether, if the children had been blessed with the organ of sound, they would not have made most excellent singers.
Exigencies of space forbid me to go fully into all I saw and heard and did in a seven hours' visit to the institution, during which, under Dr. Elliott's guidance, I played the part of amateur examiner and inspector of the deaf and dumb. First I went over the whole place to get a general impression, and then a spent a considerable time with various classes. The great difficulty with the dumb is language. Signs indicating mere facts and objects they adopt naturally, and are not difficult to understand. Language, however, whether they are to be taught to speak or not, they must have, if they are to communicate intelligibly with the hearing world. Dr. Elliott, by signs, asked a child whose parents are both deaf and dumb, whether she had a brother deaf and dumb, and if he went to school. Her answer in dumb motion was, "One—school not yet—London." Interpreted, this meant, "I have a brother who has not yet gone to school. He is in London." To develop language, the silently taught children are made to write fully a description of the actions of the teacher; the oral pupils, of course, learn language by speech. Dr. Elliott points to his hat, places it on his head, and tells a class of girls to write. Two make the mistake of saying that "he placed the hat in his head," and it is not the simplest thing in the world to show them the difference between "in" and "on." The junior oral classes are both sides of the classes where the children are taught by signs. The noise they make momentarily suggests that it must be very distracting for the teachers and pupils in the intervening room. One forgets that neither teacher nor pupil by the sign system hears a sound, and that in the midst of the din they are in quiet. The best teachers of the deaf by signs are the deaf, I should say, just as the best leaders and teachers of the blind are blind. For the oral classes, of course, a teacher with ears
