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Milwaukee School of Music John C. Fillmore, Director 
Milwaukee, Wis., March 20th, 1894, 89
My dear Miss Fletcher:---Please don't worry yourself about those stupid at Washington. "Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar, with a pestle, among wheat, yet will not his foolishness depart from him". If a man isn't musician enough to know that the're is no music without tonality and doesn't know tonality when he hears it, there is no more use in discussing music with him than colors with a blind man. Let the asses bray, ad libitum; it is not a dangerous noise and I always found it amusing. Just wait until they push something where I can get a chance to review it; see if I don't pulverize them, as I did Gilman. Of course they will never know it; I shan't do it for their sakes, but for the sake of the sensible people. I don't want to talk with those people or to know them at all. I have no time to spend on blockheads. 
What you say makes me feel more and more certain that I don't want anything to do with the Bureau of Ethnology. A please there would probably mean intolerable slavery. I am going to be free to speak my mind anywhere and to anybody; and when a donkey brays in my ear, to inform him of the fact that he is a donkey, if I feel like it. I am planning to turn over a large part of my teaching to my son, next year and raise the price of what teaching I do, so as to have more leisure, without any diminution of income. I have strong hopes that my scheme can be made to work, and then I shall be independent of Congressmen, Bureau