better than that of getting money out of people who don’t want to part
with it. It is always for good objects, of course. This is the plan:
When you call upon a person to contribute to a great and good object, and
you think he should furnish about $1,000, he disappoints you as like as
not. Much the best way to work him to supply that thousand dollars is to
split it into parts and contribute, say a hundred dollars a year, or
fifty, or whatever the sum maybe. Let him contribute ten or twenty a
year. He doesn’t feel that, but he does feel it when you call upon him
to contribute a large amount. When you get used to it you would rather
contribute than borrow money.
I tried it in Helen Keller’s case. Mr. Hutton wrote me in 1896 or 1897
when I was in London and said: “The gentleman who has been so liberal in
taking care of Helen Keller has died without making provision for her in
his will, and now they don’t know what to do.” They were proposing to
raise a fund, and he thought $50,000 enough to furnish an income of $2400
or $2500 a year for the support of that wonderful girl and her wonderful
teacher, Miss Sullivan, now Mrs. Macy. I wrote to Mr. Hutton and said:
“Go on, get up your fund. It will be slow, but if you want quick work,
I propose this system,” the system I speak of, of asking people to
contribute such and such a sum from year to year and drop out whenever
they please, and he would find there wouldn’t be any difficulty, people
wouldn’t feel the burden of it. And he wrote back saying he had raised
the $2400 a year indefinitely by that system in, a single afternoon. We
would like to do something just like that to-night. We will take as many
checks as you care to give. You can leave your donations in the big room
outside.
I knew once what it was to be blind. I shall never forget that
experience. I have been as blind as anybody ever was for three or four
hours, and the sufferings that I endured and the mishaps and the
accidents that are burning in my memory make my sympathy rise when I feel
for the blind and always shall feel. I once went to Heidelberg on an
excursion. I took a clergyman along with me, the Rev. Joseph Twichell,
of Hartford, who is still among the living despite that fact. I always
travel with clergymen when I can. It is better for them, it is better
for me. And any preacher who goes out with me in stormy weather and
without a lightning rod is a good one. The Reverend Twichell is one of
those people filled with patience and endurance, two good ingredients for
a man travelling with me, so we got along very well together. In that
old town they have not altered a house nor built one in 1500 years. We
went to the inn and they placed Twichell and me in a most colossal
bedroom, the largest I ever saw or heard of. It was as big as this room.
I didn’t take much notice of the place. I didn’t really get my bearings.
I noticed Twichell got a German bed about two feet wide, the kind in
which you’ve got to lie on your edge, because there isn’t room to lie on
your back, and he was way down south in that big room, and I was way up
north at the other end of it, with a regular Sahara in between.
We went to bed. Twichell went to sleep, but then he had his conscience
loaded and it was easy for him to get to sleep. I couldn’t get to sleep.
It was one of those torturing kinds of lovely summer nights when you hear
various kinds of noises now and then. A mouse away off in the southwest.
You throw things at the mouse. That encourages the mouse. But I
couldn’t stand it, and about two o’clock I got up and thought I would