responsibilities put upon you by the emperor and people. May
God assist us!

Students the world over are now recalling dubiously the fateful French
States-General of 1789.

FROM THOSE WHO LIVE IN DARKNESS.

A Pathetic Picture of the Sadness of
Being Blind, Drawn for Us by
One Who Has Never Seen.

Helen Keller, the marvelous deaf and blind girl, whose life would be
pathetic, were it not so great a triumph over the limitations of silence
and darkness, keeps close to her fellows through the sense of touch. One
would think that, knowing others to have so much which she can never have,
her outlook would be sorrowful. But she is no pessimist. We who can see
are more depressed by our apparent inability to solve the mysteries of a
future life, or to prevent injustice in this, than is she by the physical
helplessness of blindness.

That the lot of the blind is sad, she nevertheless admits. A meeting was
held in New York a few weeks ago in the interests of the blind. The
principal speakers were Joseph H. Choate and Mark Twain. From a sick bed
Miss Keller had written a letter, which Mark Twain read to the assembled
audience, prefacing it with the statement that it deserved a place among
the classics of literature. Her picture of the sadness of being blind was
as follows:

To know what the blind man needs, you who can see must
imagine what it would be not to see, and you can imagine it
more vividly if you remember that before your journey's end
you may have to go the dark way yourself. Try to realize
what blindness means to those whose joyous activity is
stricken to inaction.

It is to live long, long days--and life is made up of days.
It is to live immured, baffled, impotent, all God's world
shut out. It is to sit helpless, defrauded, while your
spirit strains and tugs at its fetters and your shoulders
ache for the burden they are denied, the rightful burden of
labor.

The seeing man goes about his business confident and
self-dependent. He does his share of the work of the world
in mine, in quarry, in factory, in counting-room, asking of
others no boon save the opportunity to do a man's part and
to receive the laborer's guerdon.

In an instant accident blinds him. The day is blotted out.
Night envelops all the visible world. The feet which once
bore him to his task with firm and confident stride stumble
and halt and f