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Let us pass to a case which it has been decided is ready for home industry. What shall it be? One of the few trades which are now available for the blind? Then which of these? Local condition again: the market, nature of business and trade in the community, etc. For example, I have such an application from a man of foreign birth who lives in a town noted for the manufacture of chairs, where seats are put out to be caned from the factory at prices which I would be ashamed to quote; where every woman and child of the laboring classes not employed in the factories themselves canes at home. Caning for such a man would be absurd; but as he has a strong association in his town of those of his own nation, and as a cobbler of that nationality has only this summer closed a shop and left town, I have a most encouraging outlook for him as a cobbler, with the hearty support of his community. So the trade must be carefully selected, then the necessary training furnished, and afterwards perhaps help given in securing equipment and establishment. Here local interest and cooperation must be secured, as in these days of sharp competition and cut prices the newly trained and untried blind workman may sit at an empty bench.

But, again, the conditions may be such that it is better to open a small business or take up an agency for some profitable line of goods. If the man has a little sight, or by any other means is able to get about conveniently, the latter becomes possible; and if to that be added the fact that he has no home or friends, nothing to give him a starting point, it is often the most promising. Here still a different set of efforts must be exerted. Instead of training in an industrial school the man must have sound business advice; instead of tools he requires stock; the interest of the community in his undertaking is about the only element that remains the same.

And so he who undertakes to wrestle with the problem of employment for the blind, and to study over and decide upon the multitude of little problems which grow out of this large one, has no path of roses to tread, but must make up his mind to give of the best there is in him of mental energy, spiritual force, kindly patience, wise diplomacy, painstaking judgment, and endless effort of an unclassifiable nature. But if he be successful, what of all that? What satisfaction can equal the knowledge that one has been the means of helping an unfortunate brother who is down from force of circumstances which he cannot control, largely because he does not know how or lacks the force and executive ability to grapple with them. If the result of the agent's efforts, putting it on the lowest basis, is that a few more dollars a week are coming to a poor family, or, going higher in the scale, if it means that he found an idler employment and a new purpose in life, or if, perhaps higher still, he enables the man who has been a useful citizen and the respected head of his family, and now since blindness came upon him has been obliged to sit by in a corner while the world moves on and his children and he stand in reversed relations -- if he helps such a man again to resume the dignity and privileges of his manhood and again hold up his head in his community as master of himself and his situation, is it not the Master's work?