Library Collections: Document: Full Text

The age of miracles is not past. Ours is emphatically such an age. The blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear and the dumb speak, in a somewhat different way, it is true, and by very different means, but not less really and truly, than when the disciples of John Baptist came to Jesus to obtain evidence, whether he were the Christ.

We had often been in Asylums for the deaf and dumb, for the blind, and for the insane, and seen with delight how much can be done to ameliorate the condition, and even to educate the minds and hearts of these unfortunate classes. But it remained for a recent visit to the institution we have named at the head of this article, to show us the highest triumph of charity and guided by wisdom. Nothing ever seemed so much like raising the dead, like breathing the breath of life into a human body, and animating it with a living soul. There were persons, who a year since only breathed and unconsciously digested the food which they scarcely knew how to swallow, who were incapable of walking or performing any voluntary motions, now climbing ladders, rolling at nine-pins, catching dumb-bells, and going through various gymnastic exercises with a great degree of agility. Others came to the institution, as almost all idiots are, as helpless in their personal decencies as the veriest infant, and far more disgusting to the eye and every sense of the beholder; but they have been taught to dress decently, to maintain personal cleanliness, and to observe the proprieties of life to such a degree, that the teacher and proprietor of the establishment, who had witnessed all the transformation, could not but look on them and speak of them now, as "beautiful" children. Others again, not purely and strictly idiotic, but whom, from some case or other, their parents and ordinary teachers had been unable to teach anything, have mastered the elements of geography and arithmetic, and were seen at their desks with their books in their hands and learning their lessons, like any other scholars of their age.

It was delightful to behold the inexhaustible patience and unwearied kindness with which Dr. and Mrs. Wilbur devoted themselves to the comfort and improvement of these poor creatures, not only teaching and training them by day, but watching over them by night, not as if impelled by necessity or mere duty, still less for filthy lucre's sake, but expressing and manifestly feeling toward them, in no small measure, the tenderness of parental love. And it was painfully interesting to see how the helpless innocents in return clung to their lips, and watched their every movement with all an infant's feeling of affection and dependence. May they meet their reward from an enlightened public and a liberal commonwealth, which their self-denying labors so richly deserve.

The Institution at Barre is wholly a private enterprise. The children are chiefly, if not altogether, the children of parents in comfortable circumstances. It was instructive and affecting to hear what names they have, and to learn what families they represented.

There is but one other Institution of the kind in the United States. That is under the direction of Dr. Howe, and is connected with the Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind in Boston. Of course it is sustained by the state. It was opened a little more than a year since, with only ten or twelve pupils, and simply as an experiment. The result in Boston, as in Barre, has demonstrated the possibility, and therefore the duty, of greatly improving the condition of a class hitherto sunk in hopeless degradation and wretchedness. There is work enough for more than one or two such schools, to educate the 1400 or 1500 idiots in this commonwealth, and the State Treasury should be opened freely for the support of so noble a charity. -- Congregationalist.