It is of course well that people should do the duty that lies nearest to hand first, and so if it be a duty to encourage, to endow, or to patronize art, that duty should begin at home. But this again is a very narrow way of looking at the matter. It is not at all essential that art should be national; on the contrary, art is universal and cannot be bound by any such limits. No barriers stand in the way of one who would admire a foreign painting; one may speak no language but one's own and yet find as much beauty, joy, and inspiration in foreign works of art as in those produced by men of one's own nationality. A visitor to a collection of works of art has to be told by a catalog, or he would not know, what country produced any particular work; so it is with music, and largely with architecture; indeed that which is of Art is universal: the national characteristics are limitations imposed by circumstances upon the free expression of the soul. The soul of man is not eternally bound within the limits of one nation, but must, in the course of constant reincarnations upon earth, experience the limitations of many varying nationalities. It is bound to the great human family; and it may be, for a certain period, identified with a special group. Nations are evanescent, though family groups may survive, and though an artist may be intimately bound by many ties with the destinies of some one group or family or race, in its reincarnations and in its varying national appearances, yet the artistic part of his nature is just that higher part that rises beyond such limits and appeals to all humanity, and it is the higher part of human nature that responds to the appeal of art and disregards all other limitations, such as questions of time or place or nationality, rising to what is more broadly human or more divine in the nature of man. For "Brotherhood is a fact in nature," and the soul responds unconsciously to the call of the Soul in all nature and in all humanity in such degree as it is able to throw off for a time the temporary bonds of local conditions. So it is a matter rather of satisfaction to see works of art circulating around the world and awaking the deeper sympathies that tend to unite humanity. MUSIC AND LIFE: by William A. Dunn