It required the genius of Raphael to conceive and paint “The Transfiguration.” Any ordinary artist can make a fair copy of it. But does anyone compare the copyist with the original artist? It required the genius of Sangallo and Michelangelo to rear St. Peter’s at Rome: any well-educated architect of today might rear its duplicate. But would that make the modern architect equal to the two Italian masters? Ten thousand negro men and women may be able to sit down at the piano and render Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” but does that entitle the negroes to class themselves with the Italian composer? My thought is this—the negro, assisted in every possible way by the whites, is copying the ways and learning the arts of the white man; _but the fact that he can learn to read the white man’s book does not make him the equal of the white race which produced the book._ The fact that he may learn from us how to practice law or medicine does not make him equal to the white race which _created_ the code of laws and the science of medicine. It may have required a thousand years _for us to learn_ that which we can _teach him in one year_, but the point is that the negro, in his native home, had just as much time and opportunity to evolve a civilization as we had, AND HE DID NOT DO IT. Let me repeat to you, Doctor, the unvarnished truth—for it may do you good: The advance made by your race in America is _the reflection_ of the white man’s civilization. Just that and nothing more. The negro lives in the light of the white man’s civilization and _reflects a part of that light_. He imitates an example kept before his eyes; copies models never out of his sight; echoes the words the white man utters; patterns after the manners and the methods of the whites around him, and thus _reflects_ our civilization. He has originated nothing, and if the copy, the pattern, the example were taken away he would fall back as he did in Haiti. He has never either evolved nor sustained a civilization of his own. Fortunately for the _Afro-American_, he finds himself better situated than his brethren elsewhere. In Africa and Haiti _they_ have to scuffle _for themselves_. Result—barbarism. In America _he_ swells the ranks of civilization’s advancing army, and he _has_ to go forward. We not only support him with aid of all sorts, we not only give him daily precept and example, but we _compel_ him to live a better life than he would live in Africa and Haiti. This compulsion is of two kinds, the fear of punishment and the hope of reward—thus enlisting two of the most powerful passions of the human being. It should be significant to Doctor Washington that the only portion of his race which has ever made any development is that which has the vast advantage of being sustained, encouraged, taught, led and _coerced_ by the whites among whom they live.