So much to the good. But to-day, more than ever before, many voices are urging us to go farther--and, I think, to fare worse. Artistic racialism has always been spontaneous, so far as the art is great. No composer who is worth anything can be dragooned into being patriotic: he will go his own way. Some are attracted more than others by the general types of phrase or the general emotional moods exemplified in the folk-music of their own race; but that is a matter for neither credit nor discredit. Individuality includes race as the greater includes the less. The only vital consideration is the value of the output in the general terms of all races; and indeed all great folk-music, like any other kind, speaks, for those who have ears to hear, a world-language and not a dialect. And there is still more at stake in this issue. Those who, as I do, hold that the best chance for the political future of the world lies in the weakening of national and racial as well as class consciousness, must needs regard very suspiciously any of these modern attempts to force music into channels which are deliberately designed for it by non-musical considerations: the fettering, by set purpose, of art is a very considerable step towards the fettering of life itself. England may sometimes have failed in kindness to her own artistic children, living and dead; but at any rate we have been free from the curse of a narrow jealousy and have steadfastly held to the proud faith of the open door and the open mind. The ideal--so violently dinned into our ears nowadays--of a national school of composers may very easily mean a wilful narrowing of our artistic heritage. If an English composer with nothing to say for himself imitates Brahms or Debussy, it is obviously regrettable; but he will not mend matters by imitating Purcell. And, after all, the musician who (save occasionally when seeking texts for his own individual discourses) borrows his material from his native folk-music stamps himself, just as much as if he borrowed from any other quarter, as a common plagiarist incapable of inventing material of his own. If we may adapt for the purpose Johnson's famous aphorism about patriotism and scoundrels, we may say that racial parochialism is the last refuge of composers who cannot compose. Let us assert once more the supreme beauty of folk-music at its best; but it is often childish, and, anyhow, childish or not, it is after all the work of children. And any of the world's activities would come to a strange pass if children--or any races or classes which, through lost opportunities or the oppression of others, are still virtually children--were to dictate principles of intolerance to those who, by no merit of their own but as a plain matter of fact, can possess the wider vision. Let a composer steep himself as much as he can in his native folk-music, as in all other great music, and then write in sincerity whatever is in his own marrow; but anything