The institutions are doubtless both educational and charitable, or at least ought to be, using these words in their ordinary application. It is not a question of merit or demerit on the part of the unfortunates or their families. It is not a question whether they are entitled to an education as much as normal children. So far as there is any real issue, it is one of classification for purposes of administration. The question seems to be whether the institutions that care for the above mentioned classes can best be administered under the department of charities that has charge of public institutions, or the department of education that usually has to do with institutions that furnish education only in the limited technical sense, where pupils attend school a few hours a day, but are not boarded at the institutions. Because an institution is an educational institution, I think it may be none the less a charitable institution. For example, it would hardly be denied that an orphan asylum is a charitable institution; yet an orphan asylum that was not an educational institution would be deplorable. In the state institutions for the deaf and the blind, throughout the country, the educational side is very properly emphasized.... These inmates would properly be classed as public dependents as they usually have been.... The whole trouble seems to arise from a feeling of aversion to the word "charity", and probably the word has been degraded.... To refer to the institutions under consideration as "educational institutions", without any qualification, would not be in the interest of clearness of thought, and would either lead to confusion or to some qualifying phrases, because the deaf and the blind are certainly different enough from the normal child to be considered, for many purposes, in a separate class, and the institutions which educate and support them, it would seem to me, need some term by which they can be designated, which would distinguish them from the educational institutions designed for the normal child. ARGUMENTS IN OPPOSITION TO THE CONNECTION