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For the capable blind artisan, I favor the workshop instead of the industrial home. It enables him to work at his trade; to receive wages proportionate to his industry; to live in a community with seeing neighbors; to unite the duties and responsibilities of the citizen of the normal social fabric, instead of vegetating in restricted artificial life of an institution. The condition of the invalid, feeble-minded, or aged blind presents a different problem, which demands entirely different treatment.

A general wave of interest in the training and employment of the adult blind has spread throughout the United States in the last few years. The latest appropriation for state aid is $40,000, made by the Legislature of Maine for solving the industrial problem. Maryland has appropriated $1,500 for two years to aid a Commission of Five in solving the problem presented in this phase of the work. Delaware has spent $1,200 in the past year for similar work. Rhode Island has appropriated $2,500. Wisconsin's latest appropriation was for $5,700, and Michigan $69,500. The Scotoic Aid Society of St. Louis, a private organization of sixty-five philanthropic citizens, is the latest society to aid the adult blind.

With Massachusetts spending $45,000 a year for training and placing the adult blind, Pennsylvania spending $20,000 a year for the last thirty years, California $25,000 a year for many years, Illinois $55,000 for the last four years; with all the wealth of material, equipment, and growing interest manifested from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we may believe that the time is near at hand for the solution of the many difficult and complex problems that invest this work of training the blind for self-support.

They require patient, persistent effort, but we hope that the United States of America, with her richness of benevolent achievement and multiplicity of industrial processes, will aid her sister nations in finding the answers to these vital questions, and will enlarge the opportunities of the blind and help them to attain to economic independence.