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to Greece a shipload of food and clothing for the starving women .nd children.
Having fed them, he set them to work; built a hospital and a mole (which stands to this day in XEgina), founded a colony, and turned the half-naked peasants into farmers.
These matters have been fully related elsewhere.1
Returning to this country in 1831, he took up the education of the blind, which was to be chief among the multifarious labors of his life.
When Julia Ward first met him, he had been for nine years Director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, and was known throughout the civilized world as the man who had first taught language to a blind deaf mute (Laura Bridgman).
Up to this time a person thus afflicted was classed with idiots, “because,” as Blackstone says, “his mind cannot be reached.”
This dictum had been recently reaffirmed by a body of learned men. Dr. Howe thought otherwise.
Briefly, he invented a new science.
“He carefully reasoned out every step of the way, and made a full and clear record of the methods which he invented, not for his pupils alone, but for the whole afflicted class for which he opened the way to human fellowship.... His methods have been employed in all subsequent cases, and after seventy years of trial remain the standard.”
2
Hand in hand with Dorothea Dix, he was beginning the great fight for helping and uplifting the insane; was already, with Horace Mann, considering the condition
1 Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe.
2 Memoir of Dr. Samuel G. Howe, by Julia Ward Howe.
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
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