Your Committee feel that their report would be very imperfect if they did not allude to the great services which have been rendered to this society, during the last year, by Miss Gilbert, the foundress of the Association. Whenever pecuniary embarrassment has threatened the efficiency of the Institution, her active zeal has soon replenished the funds; and when the Association has been unable to relieve the most distressing cases that have been pressed on their notice, the sufferers have found her ever ready to afford them timely help; and that, too, in a way which has shown such sympathising interest in their privations, as well as so much consideration for their feelings, that the value of the aid thus afforded can be fully appreciated only by those who have received it.
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."
Bessie's early education and happy home life counted for much in her work on behalf of the blind. She knew the advantage of being thrown on her own resources, of learning the ways of a house and the paths of a garden. She knew also that the happiness of the blind depends chiefly on companionship. "A deaf person," she used to say, "is very cheerful alone, much more cheerful than in society. It is social life that brings out his privation. But a blind man in a room alone is indeed solitary, and you see him at his best in society. It is social life which diminishes his disabilities."
Whilst she acquiesced, therefore, in Levy's wish that the work of the Institution should be exclusively carried on by blind persons, she was anxious that they should not be set apart and kept apart from other workmen.
Her diary for 1858 contains the following passage:
Spoke to Levy about the workpeople in the Repository not having intercourse enough with those who see, and thought of the possibility of their belonging to Mr. Maurice's Working Men's College; I think that might be just the thing. L. asked what I thought about their attending a Bible Class by any of Mr. Dale's curates. I said I should like it, provided the mistake was not made of talking to them upon religion as if it must be a sort of last resource to the blind, to make up for the want of other things. L. understood what I meant, and said he was glad I had mentioned it.