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EDUCATING THE ADULT BLIND.

That was a very important discussion which took place Thursday evening at the conference of the Twentieth Century Club when education for the blind was the topic under consideration. Among those who spoke were Dr. Anagnos, superintendent of the Perkins institute at South Boston, Hon. Frank A. Hill, secretary of the State Board of Education, and Rev. Francis H. Rowley, who has made a special study of the conditions surrounding blindness, and they all were of the opinion that there should be an extension of the State's activity along the line of industrial training for this unfortunate class. Dr. Anagnos gave it as his belief that no occupation by the blind can be made financially successful under the present industrial conditions.

Mr. Rowley, however, it was who brought out the truth that two very distinct reforms are needed in this matter in Massachusetts. "There should be," he said, "a board of education charged with the home teaching of the blind, and this board should have under its care those over the age permitted by the Perkins Institute. It should have further a fund sufficient to enlarge its force of teachers. Industrial homes, too, are necessary, places to which the indigent blind could turn in their distress and live while learning what will enable them to support themselves." It is good to know in this connection that a little group of women from the Women's Educational and Industrial Union have lately as a committee on ethics devoted themselves especially to a diligent preparing of the way for the reforms Mr. Rowley advocates. They are thus doing work which will prove of immense value when Massachusetts has awakened to a proper sense of her duty toward the blind.

In our neighboring State of Connecticut we learn the usual discrimination as to age is not made, and a blind person who has learned a trade at the Radford Industrial Home is even given $200 to aid in setting up in some business which, it is hoped, may form a means of self-support. It is, of course, for the adult blind that help is most needed hereabouts.

Boston has an admirable institution for the use of blind children, a school which, because it is liberally endowed, can excellently educate those who are blind in youth. But the doors of this institution are closed to all who lose their sight after the age of nineteen years. And inasmuch as reliable statistics show that more than two-thirds of the blind have lost their sight after they were twenty-one, it is evident that there is a deplorably large class for which the Perkins Institution makes absolutely no provision.

In England and Wales there are excellent facilities for teaching the adult blind, a British and Foreign Blind Association which provides work and literature for this afflicted class; a Gardner-Trust, with an income which pensions the indigent blind, and special facilities at Oxford, Cambridge and other colleges for people who have lost their sight. Moreover, there are over fifty home-teaching societies, supported largely by the established church as well as several non-sectarian societies, which employ blind men to teach other blind.

It seems to be quite time that we in this part of the world should rise to our duty in this particular. We might start a workshop similar to that in Philadelphia, where from one hundred to 140 blind persons have earned a means of livelihood, the enterprise all the time paying its way. Or we might at least educate in reading and writing this unfortunate class. Something certainly should be done, and that soon, for those who, though this affliction come upon them, in their later years, have lost their means of self-support. Blindness may descend unexpectedly upon any one of us at any time. Should it come, we should be obliged, as things are now in Massachusetts, to spend all the rest of our lives in brain as well as world blackness. Even public library reading-rooms for the blind are lacking -- though it is certainly a great pleasure to observe that in a certain city not twenty-five miles from Boston one of these important institutions was opened only a few weeks ago. Truly, the harvest is plenteous and the laborers few.