72 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
learned by experience how sweet a thing it is to communicate freely 
with other minds, and they are continually hampered and annoyed 
by the difficulty they meet with in conversing with their own parents 
and friends. ; 
Can it be wondered at, therefore, that such a child soon tires of 
home? He longs for the school play-ground, and the deaf com- 
panions with whom he can converse so easily. Little by little the 
ties of blood and relationship are weakened, and the institution be- 
comes his home. 
Nor are these all the harmful effects that are directly traceable 
to the habitual use in school, as a means of communication, of a 
language foreign to the mass of the people. Disastrous results are 
traceable inwards in the operation of his mind, and outwards in his 
relation to the external world in adult life. He has learned to 
think in the gesture-language, and his most perfected English ex- 
pressions are only translations of his sign speech. 
As a general rule, when his education is completed, his knowl- 
edge of the English language is like the knowledge of French or 
German possessed by the average hearing child on leaving school. 
He cannot read an ordinary book intelligently without frequent re- 
course to a dictionary. He can understand a good deal of what he 
sees in the newspapers, especially if it concerns what interests him 
personally, and he can generally manage to make people under- 
stand what he wishes by writing, but he writes in broken English, 
as a foreigner would speak. 
Let us consider for a moment the condition of a person whose 
vernacular is different from that of the people by whom he is sur- 
rounded. Place one of our American school boys just graduated 
from school in the heart of Germany. He finds that his knowledge 
of German is not sufficient to enable him to communicate freely 
with the people. He thinks in English, and has to go through a 
mental process of translation before he can understand what is said, 
or can himself say what he means. Constant communication with 
the people involves constant effort and a mental strain. Under 
such circumstances what a pleasure it is for him to meet with a per- 
son who can speak the English tongue. What a felief to be able 
to converse freely once more in his own vernacular. Words arise 
so spontaneously in the mind that the thought seems to evoke the 
proper expression. 
But mark the result: the more he associates with English- 
