Ignace Paderewski made his first appearance in America in 1891, and I conducted his first five orchestral concerts. He came under the auspices of Steinway and Sons, and they told me that the gross receipts for the first concert were only five hundred dollars! His playing as well as his personality, however, immediately took our public by storm, and I do not think that since the days of Franz Liszt there has been any other travelling virtuoso in whom the man was as fascinating as the artist. People who have wondered how it was possible for him when the Great War began to throw himself so fully equipped at every point into the struggle to achieve national unity for Poland, do not realize that he was, consciously or unconsciously, preparing himself for just this opportunity all his life. He had always dreamed of a united and independent Poland. He knew the history of his people, their strength, and their weakness. It is said that one day he played before the Czar who, congratulating him, expressed his pleasure that a “Russian” should have achieved such eminence in his art. Paderewski answered: “I am a Pole, your Majesty,” and, needless to say, was never again invited to play in Russia. His mind is one of the most extraordinary I have ever come in contact with. All the world knows what he has achieved in music—his inspired interpretations, his prodigious memory, and the subtle range of colors of his musical palette, but not so many know of his interest in literature, philosophy, and history, and it took the Great War to demonstrate that as orator and statesman he ranks as high as musician. I heard him make a speech on Poland during the Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 before an audience of ten thousand, in which he gave so eloquent a survey of Poland’s history and of her needs and rights, as to rouse the people to a frenzy of enthusiasm, and I am convinced that Poland owes her national existence to-day to his statesmanship and to the sympathy which his personality created among the Allies at the Versailles Conference. I believe that Colonel House pronounced him to be the greatest statesman of the Conference, and it was only the cynical Clemenceau who said to him: “M. Paderewski, you were the greatest pianist in the world and you have chosen to descend to our level. What a pity!” When he first came to America, his English was very incomplete but even then he demonstrated his grasp of it in unmistakable fashion. One evening he, my wife, and I dined at the house of very dear mutual friends, Mr. and Mrs. John E. Cowdin, in Gramercy Park. Cowdin had all his life been an enthusiastic polo player, and after dinner Paderewski and I admired some handsome silver trophies that he had won and that were placed in the dining-room. I said: “You see the difference between you and Johnny is that he wins his prizes in playing polo while you win yours in playing solo.”