Now, while I trust that none of you will ever become altogether blind, I tell you honestly, I greatly fear that some of you are in danger of becoming partly so,—of becoming blind to many of the things about you that would please you greatly if you only saw them. And I know that this sort of blindness must take from your lives much happiness.
But still you may wonder how I know this about children whom I have never seen. How can I know whether the boys and girls who read this are in any danger of losing their power to see?
Well, the only way I know about you boys and girls, whom I have never seen, is by watching very carefully the ones I do see.
You children who live in New York, say, have never seen the children who live in California; yet you feel sure that they have eyes and ears just as you have, do you not?
And you are pretty confident that most of them like to play far better than they like to work; that sometimes they are good-natured, and that again they are quarrelsome; and that in many ways they are like the boys and girls who live near you.
In just the same way I am able to guess that you children whom I do not know are more or less like the ones I do know.
Now, among these children only a few, as I have said before, seem to have the full use of their eyes. This troubles me, because the evil is one that grows greater as the children grow older. Perhaps you know that if you stop using any part of your body, that part soon begins to lose its power of doing the things it was meant to do.
If you should not use your legs for a long time, they would grow so weak that they could hardly carry you. It would be much as if you had no legs, or at least as if you had legs that could not do the work they were meant to do.
If you stopped using your hands, you would find your fingers growing stiffer and stiffer, so that at last they could not take a good hold of things.
And if your eyes are not used for seeing clearly the things before them, they will grow less and less able to see clearly.