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The advent of the automobile has greatly added to the blind man's difficulties. Many a sightless person who at one time travelled alone with ease has resigned himself to idleness in the face of the terrors of motor traffic.

Fortunate indeed is the blind man who is in a financial position to hire a guide. Allowance for guide service should always be made when the budget of a sightless person is calculated even when that budget must be met at public expense. Our government has recognized that blind people should not be compelled to depend upon the charity of their neighbors for food and clothing but still, in most instances, the blind man must depend upon the charity of his associates when he wishes to walk about his neighborhood in safety.

Some substitutes for a human guide have been found. When the first savage lost his sight in the wilderness, he probably learned to make good use of his club in getting about from place to place. The blind man and his staff have become proverbial since the days of Greek mythology and the Bible. The use of the cane, however, has received more attention during the past fifty years than heretofore. Home teachers have taught their pupils to use a cane and blind people have become expert in making use of their trusty stick, but for years few attempts were made to analyze this skill and teach any particular method for using it.

William Hanks Levy, in 1872, went into considerable detail in his book Blindness and the Blind in describing the use of the cane. Richard E. Hoover, when assigned the responsibility for training the men blinded in the second world war to travel about alone reduced the use of the cane to a scientific method which was taught to U.S. Army men who went through training courses at Valley Forge General Hospital. Probably most of these students later modified Hoover's method in one way or another to suit their own needs, but to Hoover should go the credit for insisting that the art of traveling about with a cane should not be left to the chance resourcefulness of each individual. His method was not only used at Valley Forge and the U.S. Army's Dibble General Hospital but for a time regular courses were offered at the Maryland School for the Blind and elsewhere for rehabilitation workers. The method has been brought to, a point of perfection in the instruction of blinded veterans at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Hines, Illinois.

Long before the second world war certain blind people desiring to be easily recognized as sightless in modern traffic began carrying a white cane. It is claimed that the white cane movement originated in France and soon found its way across the Channel to England. In the United States action was first taken in Peoria, Illinois, where the first city ordinance requiring regulation of the use of the white cane was passed in 1930. In quick succession other city ordinances were passed and soon laws were enacted in a majority of the states of the Union requiring automobile drivers to give the right of way to a blind person carrying a white stick. Today, thousands of autoists are quick to recognize the white cane as an indication that the carrier cannot use ordinary care in avoiding a collision.

Many blind people object to carrying the white cane as they feel that it makes their blindness too conspicuous in ordinary social intercourse. Most blind people use the cane as a means of learning the contour of the path immediately ahead of their feet. Tapping with the cane is not used by the blind man to warn other pedestrians of his approach in the hope that they will clear the way, but is used, rather, to get the echo from walls, buildings, trees, bushes and the like. This echo tells him much about the character of his surroundings far beyond the reach of his cane. It greatly augments any information which the blind man may derive from so-called facial perception or obstacle sense.

The cane, however, is not the only tool whose use has been greatly developed during the twentieth century. For centuries blind people have traveled about with the faithful dog which guides them through many a complicated situation. Early in the nineteenth century Johann Wilhelm Klein of Vienna wrote a book on the education of the blind describing a method of training dog guides, but there seems to be no record indicating whether or not these trained guide dogs were actually ever put to use. During the first world war a problem presented by the thousands of soldiers who lost their sight in the German army was met by the German Government by developing a system of training guide dogs for its blinded veterans. Four large schools and many small ones were set up in Germany for the training of these dogs which were provided without cost for the blinded veterans.

In 1927 Mrs. Dorothy Harrison Eustis, an American woman, was conducting an experiment near Vevey, Switzerland in the training of dogs for various uses. Her kennels were known as Fortunate Fields. Here she trained dogs for the state police and the Red Cross, and liaison dogs for the Swiss Army. These dogs were trained for criminal trailing, and as prison and railroad yard guards. She was filled with a zeal to increase the dog's usefulness to man. When in that year she heard that schools in Germany were training dogs as guides for the blind, she visited Potsdam and other places and studied their methods. On November 5, 1927 an article by her entitled "The Seeing Eye" was published in The Saturday Evening Post. This article described the use of the guide dogs for the blind in Germany. She drew her name from Proverbs 20:12 "The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord bath made even both of them." This article was read with much interest by many blind people in America and more than one envisioned the dog as his emancipator. Morris Frank, a young blind insurance salesman in Nashville, Tennessee immediately communicated with Mrs. Eustis to learn where he could obtain such a dog and expressed the ambition to organize a training school in the United States where such dogs might be educated and provided to blind people on this side of the water. Frank journeyed to Vevey, Switzerland, learned to use a dog at Fortunate Fields and returned to the United States a "free man." The author well remembers Morris Frank calling him on the phone when he arrived in New York on his way to Europe. He expressed a desire to call on the writer but was appalled by the terrors of New York traffic. However, arrangements were made for him to come to the American Foundation for the Blind in a taxi with an escort. Four months later Frank again called the author on the phone from the same hotel two miles away and made an appointment to come to the Foundation an hour later. Accompanied only by his dog, Frank traveled across the city on foot to the Foundation offices and after a chat of an hour or so returned alone with his dog to his hotel full of enthusiasm for the new day for the blind.