Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/710

 690 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

he may have a benefactor who understands business, he must remain a workman laboring separated from others. There are, to be sure, several who have a business which they themselves can carry on, and which is flourishing, and who are married and able to gain means for their families ; but these belong mostly to those happier people who have a brother or a cousin with whom they may live, and who will teach them business life. Still, though working alone, the blind tradesman is never left alone. The institution of Dresden will take care of him throughout his life. When it cannot allow him to return to his family, or if he has no father or mother to live with, it will find a suitable place for him, where he may spend his days for a moderate sum. That is usually a simple family which will not make him a present, but which will also not earn a great deal through him. Not seldom it is a blind man who has a shop himself. There are even some colonies of blind people working together. The institution will buy materials for them. It will advertise their work, try to find connections with manufacturers for them, and, if they cannot sell all their work, it will do it for them. None of them receive regular assistance, but most of them get now and then financial help.

The blind workman is at a disadvantage working alone. Measuring and other processes which a man who can see does not need, will take him a good deal of time, and still his work very often is not quite what is expected. Besides, the making of bas- kets, brushes, ropes, paper sacks, stockings, or similar things are occupations which are pretty low paid even to seeing people. Thus it is easily understood that the income of the blind trades- man must be rather low.

The blind people of the working classes are rather modest, and not much is needed to make them happy just a family of which they are considered a member, and which takes from them the chief difficulties of their trade and of their lives. There have been institutions for them, in which they were well cared for, but a man does not like to live only in order to eat and drink, but he wishes to have his share in the life of his fellow-men. Excluded from life and living as a monk, he feels fully his dependence ; he feels how unhappy a blind person is.