GREAT BRITAIN’S BLIND.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5158, 29 July 1927, Page 4

GREAT BRITAIN’S BLIND.

BETTERING THE LOT OF VICTIMS. NEW LIBRARY WING .OPENED. There are 50,000 victims living in Great Britain surrounded by the everenduring dark, cut off from the cheerful ways of men and presented with a universal blank in place of summer’s rose- or human face divine. In one aspect only is their lot better than that of the author of “Paradise Lost.” Wisdom is no longer at one entrance shut out since the invention of Braille. The National Library for the Blind (says the London Daily Telegraph in connection with the opening of the new wing of the library) was founded 30 years after the death of Louise Braille by a blind woman in a little room in Hampstead, assisted by a grant of £25 from a blind charity. That was 45 years ago. To-day the library is at Westminster, .and, in its new form, which includes the extension just opened, contains 100,000 books, and is list’d by 10,000 readers. The necessity for such a library becomes immediately apparent when we realise that only 10,000 of our 50,000 blind are employable on such jobs as basket-making, mat-weaving, and massiage. Some 13,000 are pensioners over th'e* age of 50, and e*ven of those who are not old the vast majority have to rely entirely, all and every day, on the loving care of some person to keep them occupied. Time, hangs heavily enough on the hands of a man possessed of all his faculties, when he is precluded both from work and play. It requires little omagination to realise what it means for the blind. Reading, then, is an incalculable boon to the sightless unemployable. The' time will doubtless come when the domino dot system of Braille will be superseded, for, in spite of th'e- fact that it is easy to learn, and that it enables a man not only to read but to keep a memoranda, write liis own;music, emboss ihis own books, frojn . dictation, 'and carry on correspondence, it is yet so cumbersome, that an ordinary modern novel occupies five volumes, each a foot long and nearly a foot wide, and weighs as much as an old-fashioned county history. It is little wonder that over a ton of so bulky a literature has to be despatched daily from the library. We can, however, rely on students' of research to be experimenting keenly to reduce the bulkiness of books for the blind as they are to eliminate the disease. It is the humbler and easier task of the generous public to alleviate existing suffering. So far as the blind are concerned tlie way is obvious. It is to add books to the library in such numbers that all who are blind may head.