PRESIDENT BEL L ON J A PA N 511 



on you, and that you will one day utilize it fully may be confidently in- 

 ferred, I think, from the story of your progress during the past twenty- 

 five years. I am particularly interested in observing that you appreciate 

 the great truth which we in the West have come to recognize : the truth 

 that education is the basis of progress and prosperity. Educate the masses, 

 elevate their standard of intelligence, and you will certainly have a suc- 

 cessful nation. That is what we tell ourselves, and the latest reports of 

 your department of education show that it is what you tell yourselves also, 

 for I learn from the reports, if my memory serves me, that no less than 

 64 per cent of your school-age children throughout the empire are re- 

 ceiving education, and that, in the case of male children, the percentage 

 is as much as 79. Those are highly creditable figures, and they may be 

 accepted as evidence that your progress stands on a really sound basis. 

 But I do not find things equally satisfactory throughout the whole field 

 of education, for whereas 64 per cent of your healthy children are re- 

 ceiving instruction, only 3 per cent of your deaf and dumb are similarly 

 fortunate. Your educational statistics show that among your children of 

 school-going age there are no less than four thousand afflicted with the 

 calamity of deafness. How many of them are receiving education ? Only 

 a hundred and twenty. Think of what that means. I do not speak 

 much of the blind. With them I have not had much to do. Their ca- 

 lamity seems too terrible. It necessarily limits the range of possible effort 

 on their behalf. But the deaf and dumb appeal to our sympathy all the 

 more strongly, inasmuch as we can do much to assist them. It is generally 

 supposed that dumbness indicates some radical defect of the vocal organs. 

 In the vast majority of cases such a supposition is entirely mistaken. 

 Dumbness comes from the fact that a child is born deaf, and that it con- 

 sequently never learns how to articulate, for it is by the medium of 

 hearing that such instruction is acquired. Put a Japanese child in Amer- 

 ica, and you find that it easily and without any apparent effort learns to 

 speak English. Put an American child in Japan, and you will soon hear 

 it speaking Japanese. The whole source of trouble, then, is that the ears 

 of these unfortunates are closed. . Their brains, their minds, are as fully 

 developed or as capable of development as yours or mine. Imagine the 

 horror of being shut off from the intellectual world that surrounds you, 

 debarred from all intercourse with your fellow-creatures, though all your 

 faculties with a solitary exception entitle you to take your place in that 

 world and enjoy that intercourse. I am proud to think that we in Amer- 

 ica have recognized these facts and acted upon them. The money de- 

 voted in America to the education of the deaf and dumb is two million 

 dollars annually, four million yen — nearly as much as the total sum spent 

 out of the public funds for all educational purposes in Japan. We have 

 forty thousand deaf mutes in the United States, and we have upward of 

 eighty schools, with an attendance of about ten thousand pupils. In the 

 city of Philadelphia there is a school whose buildings and other property 

 are valued at a million dollars, or two million yen. You in Japan must 

 have about twenty-five thousand deaf mutes in the empire, and yet you 

 have only two schools for their education, one in Kyoto and one in Tokyo. 

 That is indeed a state of affairs that calls for remed}'. Besides, this is 



