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382 CHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK.trades have been carefully and thoroughly taught, it hasbeen found that unless the institutions provide thecapital and find customers for the pupils, these pupilsare soon in financial difficulties. It is a painful factthat no boy trained for manual work in the DavidHill School for the Blind has ever succeeded. In Peking, as in other places, those who have been taughttrades, such as stereotyping, which are of use to theinstitution, rather than to the public, have provedgood, reliable workmen, but of course these are underconstant supervision and have no financial burdens tocarryȮn the other hand, it has been the common experience of all the institutions where the scholars havebeen trained as musicians, teachers or Scripture readers,that the demand for their services has been as great asthe number trained could meet, and that they havedone excellent work for Christ and His church.This brief survey would be incompleteif it did notinclude a reference to the need that exists for an extension of this work. The present schools are doing aninvaluable work in the regions where they are situated.But there is no doubt that if there were an institutionfor the blind (not in each mission, for surely such workneed know no denominational limitations, but) in eachprovince in this Empire, each would ingather a numberof pupils from its own immediate neighbourhood andwould supply blind workers to the churches in its ownregion.It isprobably w^ell known that an extensive andeffective campaign is now on foot in the United Statesfor the prevention of blindness. It is now recognizedin the medical profession that Ophthalmia Neonatorumis a definite infectious disease of the eyes of the newborn, and that more than one-fourth of all blindnessamong children is the result of this disease. It isalso known that there is now a practically infallibleremedy for this disease, which is so cheap that its use