Annotated and Abridged Artifact

Abridged Text

Discouraged by the apparent incapacity of the blind, men have only endeavored to administer to them physical comfort in the shape of food and clothing. Even the philanthropist has shrunk from the task of endeavoring to combat the ills which blindness entails upon the sufferer; and until within a few years no establishments existed in Europe, [1 »] where the blind played any other part than that of listless drones and melancholy dependents. It is a little curious, that a Pagan nation should have set a good example to enlightened Christians in this respect. It is said that, in Japan, the blind were long ago made to fill a comparatively useful sphere. The Government keeps a large number of them in an establishment, and their business is to learn the history of the empire through all the remote ages, to arrange it systematically by chapter and verse in their memories, and to transmit it to the young blind, who are to hand it down to the next generation, and thus form a sort of perennial walking and talking library of useful historical knowledge. It would be singular and interesting to enter this library of living books, and consult these breathing archives: to go up to a man, instead of pulling down a folio; to hear him repeat his index, and then to turn over the tablets of his memory like the leaves of a volume, until he comes to the matter in question.