Within the field of his peculiar activity he is a great genius. Outside of that field he was not a genius at all--as will appear by his political course in 1859. His mission was to deal with persons laboring under a disability, with criminals, paupers, young people--blind or deaf people, idiots, the maimed in spirit, the defective--the people who have no chance, no future, no hope. These were the persons to whom his life was to be devoted: the Greek sufferers were merely the earliest in the series of persons whom Howe pitied. He has left behind voluminous papers and reports, and in them lives his creed. He can hardly open his mouth without saying something of universal application to all defective persons in all ages. From the statement of abstract principles to the details of ward management--whether he is writing advice to an anxious mother or addressing the legislature--there is no side of the subject on which he is not great. His attitude toward defectives and his point of view about them form a splinter of absolute truth; religion, morality, practical wisdom, and the divinest longings of the spirit are all satisfied by it. The sight of any of these persons aroused in him such a passion of benevolence, such a whirlwind of pity, that he could do whatever was necessary. He lifted them in his arms and flew away with them like an angel. It made no difference that the cause was hopeless. He would labor a year to improve the articulation of an adult idiot, and rejoice as much over a gain of two vowels as if he had given a new art to mankind. As has been seen, Howe was originally attracted to the Greek cause through its romantic and historic appeal; but the poetry and the patriotism of the Greek Revolution were, for him, soon merged in philanthropy. His work in the Greek cause and the books and papers and speeches he had written had brought him into the world’s eye. He returned to America a famous man. He was still under thirty years of age, an unambitious man, unaware that he was in any way remarkable. He did not take up the cause of the blind because he felt within him a deep desire, a God-given calling to help the blind, but because the cause of the blind was brought to his notice by Dr. John D. Fisher, and other gentlemen in Boston, who had been studying the methods of the Abbé Haüy in Paris, and who contemplated founding a school for the blind in Boston. It was a happy hour in which they met Howe; for he was a man whose response to any call for help was automatic. He was one of those singular men in whom we can trace no course of development. Such as they are in early manhood, so they remain. It is interesting to bring together two passages, one from the beginning and the other from the latter half of his life, to show the identity of their intellectual content.