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Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe

Creator:  (editor)
Date: 1909
Publisher: Dana Estes & Company, Boston
Source: Available at selected libraries
Figures From This Artifact: Figure 1

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Page 14:

174  

"I am sorry for what you say. I can only answer now, -- that the annual expenses of this Institution have been for many years greater than the income; and that it strikes me that the State should act as a Christian gentleman does when forced to control his expenses: try first to get along by curtailing his other expenditures, and leave his charity list to the very last."

175  

There are many hundred institutions in this great country; but to many people in New England, the word means this one place; this lofty, rather bare building, with its superb outlook over the harbour, its countless windows, its playgrounds and attendant cottages. It has been all my life a familiar place, full of kindliest associations; to hundreds of blind persons it has been a second home, hardly less beloved, perhaps, than their own. I remember once saying something in jest about the bareness of its marble-paved corridors, in the presence of some ex-pupils, and being instantly taken up. "Ah! Mrs. Richards, you must not say any thing against this Institution!" and indeed I never meant to do so, for I have never visited that temple of cheerful labour without bringing away some good and happy thought.

176  

The early years at the Perkins Institution were years of romance as well as of toil. The whole place was fired with my father's spirit; teachers and pupils worked in a flame of enthusiasm, feeling his eye upon them, his step always in advance, his hand always outstretched to lead and guide them onward. Moreover the interest inspired by the new undertaking was intense, and wise and great, simple and curious, flocked to see. In the spacious rooms of the "Doctor's Wing," many notable gatherings were held. Every distinguished stranger must see Dr. Howe and his blind pupils, and having seen, must spread the tale abroad so that others might come to look on the sight, so strange then, so familiar now, of blind children at school, learning "just like other children."

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Here came also the good and great of my father's own city and State, who were his friends; Sumner, Mann, Parker and the rest, whose names are a jewelled rosary round the neck of the Commonwealth. Here he and they devised plans for the betterment of that humanity whose servants they were. Small wonder that the pupils of those days imbibed a portion of the spirit that breathed around them, and -- in many cases -- bound themselves in their turn to the same service.

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NOTE: -- The following extract from an address delivered by my father at a convention held at the New York Institution for the Blind in August, 1853, fitly supplements the note on page 14.

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"It seems but yesterday (though it is really more than twenty years) that I undertook to organize and put in operation an institution which had been incorporated four years before in Massachusetts, and I then looked around the country in vain for some one practically acquainted with the subject. There was not then upon this continent a school for the blind, a teacher of the blind, or even a blind person who had been taught by one. I had but an imperfect knowledge of the European schools, and supposed, therefore, that I should gain time, and start with greater chance of success, in what was regarded by many as a visionary enterprise, by going to Europe for teachers and for actual knowledge of all that bad been done there.

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"I went, therefore, saw what little there was to be seen of schools for the blind, and soon returned, bringing a teacher of the intellectual branches from France, and of the mechanical branches from Scotland. Meantime my old friend and companion, Dr. Russ, had been laying the foundations of the noble Institution in which we are now assembled, and Mr. Friedlander had come from Europe and been urging the inhabitants of Philadelphia to give him an opportunity of showing his skill in the art of teaching the blind, which he had so successfully practised in Germany."

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CHAPTER II.
LAURA BRIDGMAN

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"Ye who have eyes and see not, and have ears and hear not; ye who are as the hypocrites of sad countenances, and disfigure your faces that ye may seem unto men to fast; learn healthy cheerfulness, and mild contentment, from the deaf, and dumb, and blind! Self-elected saints with gloomy brows, this sightless, earless, voiceless child may teach you lessons you will do well to follow. Let that poor hand of hers lie gently on your hearts!"
CHARLES DICKENS.

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"There floats not upon the stream of life any wreck of humanity so utterly shattered and crippled that its signals of distress should not challenge attention and command assistance."
S. G. HOWE.

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THE teaching of Laura Bridgman, the blind deaf-mute, has always and rightly been considered my father's greatest achievement. Manifestly, no record of his life would be complete which should omit mention of this; yet my mention will be brief, because I hope that my sisters' work (8) will be considered complementary to mine, and will be read in connection with it. I shall, therefore, simply give my father's own account of the matter from the Reports of the Perkins Institution.


(8) See ante, p. I.

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