United States?  Then look at the terrible handicap you are placing on yourself by going home and working as a Negro composer; you can never be able to get the hearing for your work which it might deserve.  I doubt that even a white musician of recognized ability could succeed there by working on the theory that American music should be based on Negro themes.  Music is a universal art; anybody’s music belongs to everybody; you can’t limit it to race or country.  Now, if you want to become a composer, why not stay right here in Europe?  I will put you under the best teachers on the Continent.  Then if you want to write music on Negro themes, why, go ahead and do it.”

We talked for some time on music and the race question.  On the latter subject I had never before heard him express any opinion.  Between him and me no suggestion of racial differences had ever come up.  I found that he was a man entirely free from prejudice, but he recognized that prejudice was a big stubborn entity which had to be taken into account.  He went on to say:  “This idea you have of making a Negro out of yourself is nothing more than a sentiment; and you do not realize the fearful import of what you intend to do.  What kind of a Negro would you make now, especially in the South?  If you had remained there, or perhaps even in your club in New York, you might have succeeded very well; but now you would be miserable.  I can imagine no more dissatisfied human being than an educated, cultured, and refined colored man in the United States.  I have given more study to the race question in the United States than you may suppose, and I sympathize with the Negroes there; but what’s the use?  I can’t right their wrongs, and neither can you; they must do that themselves.  They are unfortunate in having wrongs to right, and you would be foolish to take their wrongs unnecessarily on your shoulders.  Perhaps some day, through study and observation, you will come to see that evil is a force, and, like the physical and chemical forces, we cannot annihilate it; we may only change its form.  We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen other forms.  We hit slavery through a great civil war.  Did we destroy it?  No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country:  in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring.  Modern civilization hit ignorance of the masses through the means of popular education.  What has it done but turn ignorance into anarchy, socialism, strikes, hatred between poor and rich, and universal discontent?  In like manner, modern philanthropy hit at suffering and disease through asylums and hospitals; it prolongs