Though, so far as is discernible from the immediate prospect, we cannot look to an early disappearance of deafness from the race, there are indications at present that deafness is tending to become less. The probabilities are that the future will be able to report advance, and so far as the ultimate results are concerned, we have no reason to be other than hopeful.
In respect to what has been accomplished for the deaf since America has become concerned in them, we have a record that may well be a distinct cause of pride. The work for the deaf in America is hardly a hundred years old. Yet in that time there has transpired what, without violence being done to language, can be called a revolution. A century ago the deaf were practically outside the pale of human thought and activities. They were in a measure believed to be without reason, and were little less than outcasts in society. To-day they have become active components of the state, possessed of education, on a level with their fellow-men nearly everywhere in the scale of human employment, capable of all the responsibilities of life, and standing in the full stature of citizenship.
Perhaps the first workers for the deaf had not placed their faith too high after all, when they declared that the deaf and dumb were to be restored to the ranks of their species. Perhaps, after all, the visions of these men have come true. Perhaps this that we call education has had something of the power they were trying to articulate. For it has come about that a part of society known as the deaf and dumb has been brought to a place of honor and worth and usefulness in the community in which they live.
However much of what was claimed has been achieved, it is certain that a great part has been realized. It has been by a slow, silent process, keeping time with the years, but none the less wonderful things have been wrought; and through it all the advance of the deaf has been constant and onward. It might be said with all truth that this whole progress has been simply the march of events. Education has ever been the master passion of Americans, and in its wide sweep the deaf too have been gathered in, and have been borne to the place where all the state had to offer as instruction was laid before them. Yet it remains that by and through all this the deaf have been the gainers as no other people in the world have ever been, and their story is as no other's in the rise of a section of mankind towards the richness and fullness of living which are the fruits of humanized society.