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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.