And yet Doctor Washington asserts, to one audience after another, that those glorious achievements of the Latins, the Italians, these imperishable and ever potent achievements of a thousand years, are exceeded by what the negroes have done in thirty years! From the Latin England took her religious organization, as Germany and Austria and France had done. Through the Latin the classic literature of Greece and earlier Rome came into the modern world—an eternal debt which we owe mainly to Petrarch. The Bourbon kings imported from Italy the architects, painters, sculptors, landscape gardeners, who laid upon uncouth feudal France the rich mantle of Italian beauty. It was the Latin who taught modern Europe how to farm, how to irrigate, how to engrave, how to make paper from rags, how to bridge the rivers, how to pave the streets, how to make canals. Some of Shakespeare’s plays are elaborations and dramatizations of Italian _novellas_. Chaucer, the father of English poetry, frankly copied from the Italian model. Milton had Dante for pioneer, Spenser had Ariosto, and Byron’s best work is in the Italian form. I presume, Doctor, that at this season of the year you are copying the style of the white man, and that you are wearing a straw hat. Well, the Latins taught us how to make straw hats. I presume that you recognize the value of _glass_—one of whose hundreds of uses is to show you how you look. Well, the Latin taught us how to make glass. I presume you realize how much the modern world, during the last thousand years, has been indebted to the modern ship. Well, the Latin taught the Anglo-Saxon how to build modern ships. I presume you appreciate good rice, Doctor. Well, the seed of the heavy upland rice which we have in this country was brought out of Italy in the pockets of Thomas Jefferson—gentleman-smuggler in that instance. I presume you will wear pink silk undergarments this season as usual, won’t you, Doctor? Well, the Latin taught modern Europe how to make and use silk. And remember that the Latin took the clumsy musical instruments of the ancient world and fashioned them into the perfect forms of the present time; and that the Italians, whom you despise, had created the violin while your race was “rattling the bones” and gradually climbing toward the “cakewalk.” * * * * * What has the negro in these United States been doing for the last thirty years, Doctor? _Copying the white man._ That’s all. He has simply been imitating, as best he could, the dress, the talk, the manners, the methods, the work of the whites. The Latin whites _originated_ a civilization; the negroes are _copying_ one. Is there no difference between the higher genius which conceives and the lower talent which copies?