The people were perishing for lack of food; he returned to America, preached a crusade, and took back to Greece a shipload of food and clothing for the starving women and children. Having fed them, he set them to work; built a hospital and a mole (which stands to this day in Ægina), founded a colony, and turned the half-naked peasants into farmers. These matters have been fully related elsewhere.[18] [18] _Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe._ Returning to this country in 1831, he took up the education of the blind, which was to be chief among the multifarious labors of his life. When Julia Ward first met him, he had been for nine years Director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, and was known throughout the civilized world as the man who had first taught language to a blind deaf mute (Laura Bridgman). Up to this time a person thus afflicted was classed with idiots, "because," as Blackstone says, "his mind cannot be reached." This dictum had been recently reaffirmed by a body of learned men. Dr. Howe thought otherwise. Briefly, he invented a new science. "He carefully reasoned out every step of the way, and made a full and clear record of the methods which he invented, not for his pupils alone, but for the whole afflicted class for which he opened the way to human fellowship.... His methods have been employed in all subsequent cases, and after seventy years of trial remain the standard."[19] [19] _Memoir of Dr. Samuel G. Howe_, by Julia Ward Howe. Hand in hand with Dorothea Dix, he was beginning the great fight for helping and uplifting the insane; was already, with Horace Mann, considering the condition of the common schools, and forging the weapons for other fights which laid the foundations of the school system of Massachusetts. Later, he was to take up the cause of the feeble-minded, the deaf mute, the prisoner, the slave; throughout his life, no one in "trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity" was ever to call on him in vain. His friends called him the "Chevalier"; partly because the King of Greece had made him a Knight of St. George, but more because they saw in him a good knight without fear and without reproach. Charles Sumner was his _alter ego_, the brother of his heart; others of his intimates at that time were Longfellow, George Hillard, Cornelius Felton, Henry Cleveland. This little knot of friends called themselves "The Five of Clubs," and met often to make merry and to discuss the things of life.