Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/738

Rh Library for the Blind connected with the Free Library, of Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Home Teaching Society and Library for the Blind. The Aid Association for the Blind of Washington, D. C., was organized about 1898 by Mrs. Hearst and Mrs. John Russell Young, the latter being its first president. At present Mrs. Charlotte Emerson Main is president.

Mrs. Rebecca McManes Colfelt and her late mother, Mrs. James McManes, have given large sums of money to pay the blind for copying books into English braille for the Library of Congress, and these ladies, by their generosity and interest in this work, made it possible for Miss Giffin, late librarian for the blind, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C, to be sent as a delegate to the International Congress held in Brussels in 1902; that held in Edinburgh, in 1905; at Manchester in 1908; Vienna in 1910, and Cairo, Egypt, in 1911. During these various trips Miss Giffin has visited schools and institutions and libraries for the blind in all the principal cities of Great Britain, Europe, Oriental Europe and Egypt. Miss Giffin has aroused the interest of prominent people in Washington to the immediate necessity of rescuing this library from ultimate destruction. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page has been made president of an organization, and Miss Giffin the director, with the hope of interesting friends all over the country to aid in this splendid work. There are eighty thousand blind in the United States, 82 per cent, beyond the school age, and two-thirds of them are dependent for their sole recreation on books. This movement is American in its spirit, and thoroughly in accord with the practice of our government. We have always prided ourselves on recognizing the rights of every class of citizens, and no woman has done a greater and more needed work better and more unselfishly than has Miss Giffin.