The difficulty of obtaining employment for the deaf has been increased in Great Britain by the Employers' Liability and Workmen's Compensation Acts, for masters are afraid--needlessly, as facts show--to employ them, under the impression that they are more liable to accidents owing to their affliction.
The new After-Care Committees of the London County Council are a late confession of a need which other bodies have long endeavoured to supply. Education should be a development of the whole nature of the child. The board of education in England provides for intellectual, industrial and physical training, but does not take cognizance of those parts of education which are far more important--the social, moral and spiritual. Some teachers, both oral and manual, do an incalculable amount of good at the cost of great self-sacrifice and in face of much discouragement. They deserve the highest praise for so doing, and such work needs to be carried on after their pupils leave school.
_History._[2]--"Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh a man dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I the Lord?" (Ex. iv. 11). Such is the first known reference to the deaf. But the significance of this statement was not realized by the ancients, who mercilessly destroyed all the defective, the deaf among the rest. Greek and Roman custom demanded their death, and they were thrown into the river, or otherwise killed, without causing any comment but that so many encumbrances had been removed. They were regarded as being on a mental level with idiots and utterly incapable of helping themselves. In later times Roman law forbade those who were deaf and dumb from birth to make a will or bequest, placing them under the care of guardians who were responsible for them to the state; though if a deaf person had lost hearing after having been educated, and could either speak or write, he retained his rights. Herodotus refers to a deaf son of Croesus, whom he declares to have suddenly recovered his speech upon seeing his father about to be killed. Gellius makes a similar statement with reference to a certain athlete. Hippocrates was in advance of Aristotle when he realized that deaf-mutes did not speak simply because they did not know how to; for the last-named seems to have considered that some defect of the intellect was the cause of their inability to utter articulate sounds. Pliny the elder and Messalla Corvinus mention deaf-mutes who could paint.