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 3 1924 029 521 113 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029521113 
 
LETTERS 
 
 INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 
 
 BY 
 
 :/cy c 
 
 Hv^Cy CAKEY, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "PKINOIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMT;" 
 "THE SLATE TRADE, DOMESTIC AND FOKKIQN," ETC. ETC. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 A. HAKT, LATE CAEEY AND HAET. 
 1863. 
 
W^VtE^A 
 
 /cornellN 
 university. 
 
 LIBRAR 
 
ADYERTISEMENT. 
 
 The following letters were written in reply to an 
 application for information from the Hon. Mr. Cooper, . 
 one of the Senators from Pennsylvania. The subject 
 being one of general interest, and the views being 
 different from those generally entertained, the author 
 deems it expedient, with a view to invite discussion, 
 to place them before the public in their present 
 shape. 
 
PHILADELPHIA* 
 T. K. AND P. O. COLLINS, PMNTERS. 
 
LETTERS 
 
 ON 
 
 INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT, 
 
 LETTEK I. 
 
 Dear Sir : — 
 
 You ask for information calculated to enable you to act under- 
 standingly in reference to the international copy-right treaty now 
 awaiting the action of the Senate. The subject is an important one, 
 more so, as I think, than is commonly supposed, and being very glad 
 to see that it is now occupying your attention, it will afford me much 
 pleasure to comply as far as in my power with your request. 
 
 Independently of the principle involved, it seems to me that 
 the course now proposed to be pursued is liable to very grave ob- 
 jection. It is an attempt to substitute the action of the Executive 
 for that of the Legislature, and in a case in which the latter is fully 
 competent to do the work. For almost twenty years, Congress has 
 been besieged with applications on the subject, but without effect. 
 Senate Committees have reported in faVor of the measure, but the 
 lower House, composed of the direct represeritatives of the people, has 
 remained unmoved. In despair of succeeding under any of the ordi- 
 nary forms of proceeding, its friends have invoked the legislation of 
 the Executive power, and the result is seen ire the fact, that the Senate, 
 as a branch of the Executive, is now called upon to sanction a law in 
 the enactment of which the House of Representatives could not be 
 induced to unite. This may be, and doubtless is, in accordance with 
 the letter of the Constitution, but it is so decidedly in opposition to 
 its spirit that, even were there no other objection, the treaty should 
 be rejected. That, however, is but the smallest of the objections to it. 
 
 If the people required such a law, nothing could be more easy than 
 
to act in this case as we have done before in similar ones. "When we 
 desired to arrange for reciprocity in relation to navigation, we fixed 
 the terms, and declared that all the other nations of the earth might 
 accede to them if they would. No treaty was needed, and we there- 
 fore became bound to no one. It was in our power to repeal the law 
 when we chose. So, again, in regard to patents. Foreigners exer- 
 cise the power of patenting their inventions, but they do so under a 
 law that is liable to repeal at the pleasure of Congress. In both of these 
 cases, the bills underwent public discussion, and the people that were 
 to be subjected to the law, saw and understood, and amended, the 
 bills before they became laws. Contrast, I beg of you, this course of 
 proceeding with the one now proposed to be* pursued in reference to 
 one of the largest branches of our internal trade. Finding that no 
 bill that could be prepared could stand the ordeal of public discussion, 
 a treaty has been negotiated, the terms of which seem to be known 
 to none but the negotiators, and that treaty has been sent to your 
 House of Congress, there to be discussed in secret session, by a number 
 of gentlemen, most of whom have given little attention to the general 
 principle involved, while not even a single one can be supposed quali- 
 fied to judge of the practical working of the provisions by whose aid 
 the principle is to be carried out. Once corffirmed, the treaty can be 
 changed only with the consent of England. Here we have secrecy in 
 the making of laws, and irrevocability of the law when made; whereas, 
 in all other cases, we have had publicity and revocability. Legisla- 
 tion like that now proposed would seem to be better suited to the 
 monarchies of Europe, than to the republic of the United States. 
 The reason why this extraordinary course has been adopted is, that 
 the people have never required the passage of such a law, and could 
 not be persuaded to sanction it now, were it submitted to them. 
 
 The French and English copy-right treaty has, as I understand, 
 caused great deterioration in the value of property that had been ac- 
 cumulated in France under the system that had before existed, and 
 such may prove to be the case with the one now under consideration. 
 Should it be so, the deterioration would prove to be fifty times greater 
 in amount than it was in France. Will it do so ? No one knows, 
 because those whose interests are to be affected by the law are not 
 permitted to read the law that is to be made. They know well that 
 they have not been consulted, and equally well do they know that 
 the negotiator is not familiar with the trade that is to bo regulated, 
 and is liable, therefore, to have given his assept to provisions that will 
 
work injury never contemplated by him at the time the treaty was 
 made. Again, provisions may have been inserted, with a view to 
 prevent injury to the publishers, or to the public, that would be found 
 in praoticb to be utterly futile, or even to augment the difficulty in- 
 stead of remedying it. That such result would follow the adoption 
 of some of those whose insertion has been urged, I can positively 
 assert. In this state of things, it would seem to be proper that we 
 should know whether the provisions of the treaty were submitted to 
 the examination of any of the parties interested for or against it, and 
 if so, to whom. So far as I can l^arn, none of those opposed to it 
 have had any opportunity afforded them of reading the law, and if 
 any advice has been taken, it must have been of those publishers who 
 are in favor of it. Those gentlemen, however, are precisely the per- 
 sons likely most to profit by the adoption of the principle recognized 
 by the treaty ; and the more disadvantageous to others the provisions 
 for carrying that principle into effect, the greater must be the advantage 
 to them. They, therefore, can be regarded as little more than the 
 exponents of the wishes of their English friends, who were counselling 
 the British Minister on the one hand, while; on the other they were, 
 through their friends here, counselling the American one. A treaty 
 negotiated under such circumstances would seem little likely to pro- 
 vide for the general interests of the American people. 
 
 When, in 1837, the attempt was first made to secure for English 
 authors the privilege of copy-right, a large number of them united in 
 an agreement declaring a certain New York house to be "the sole 
 authorized publishers and issuers" of their works. Now, had that 
 house volunteered its advice to the Secretary of State of that day, he 
 would scarcely have regarded it as sufficiently disinterested to be 
 qualified for the office it had undertaken; and yet, if any advice in 
 the present case has been asked, it would seem that it must have 
 been from houses that now look forward to filling the place then 
 occupied by that single one, and that cgnnot, therefore, be re- 
 garded as fitted for the office of counsellors to the Secretary of the 
 present day. Recollect, I am, as is everybody else, entirely in the 
 dark. No one knows who furnished advice as to the treaty, nor does 
 any one know what is to be the law when it shall have been con- 
 firmed. Neither can any one tell howthe errors that may now be made 
 will be corrected. With a law regularly passed through both Houses 
 of Congress, these difficulties could not arise. They are a natural 
 consequence of this attempt to substitute the will of the Executive 
 
8 
 
 for that of the people as expressed by the House of Representatives, 
 and should, as I think, weigh strongly on theminds of Senators when 
 called to vote upon the treaty. Their constituents have a right to 
 see, and to discuss, the laws that are proposed before those laws are 
 finally made, and whenever it is attempted, as in the present case, to 
 stifle discussion, we may reasonably infer that wrong is about to be 
 done. This is, I believe, the first case in which, on account of the 
 unpopularity of the law proposed, it has been attempted to deprive 
 the popular branch of Congress of its constitutional share in legis- 
 lation, and if this be sanctioned it is difficult to see what other inte- 
 rests may not be subjected to similar action on the part of the Exe- 
 cutive. In all such cases, it is the first step that is most difficult, 
 and before making the one now proposed, you should, as I think, 
 weigh well the importance of the precedent about to be established. 
 No one can hold in greater respect than I do, the honorable gentle- 
 man who negotiated this treaty; but, in thus attempting to substi- 
 tute the executive will for legislative action, he seems to me to have 
 made a grave mistake. 
 
 In the claim now made in behalf of English authors, there is great 
 apparent justice; but that which is not true, often puts on the ap- 
 pearance of truth. For thousands of years it iseemed so obviously true 
 that the sun revolved around the earth that the fact was not disputed, 
 and yet it came finally to be proved that the earth revolved around 
 the sun, Ricardo's theory of the occupation of the earth, the founda- 
 tion-stone of his system, had so much apparent truth to recom- 
 mend it, that it was almost universally adopted, and is now the basis 
 of the whole British politico-economical system ; and yet, the facts 
 are directly the reverse of what Ricardo supposed them to be. Such 
 being the case, it might be that, upon a full examination of the sub- 
 ject, we should find that, in admitting the claim of foreign authors, we 
 should be doing injustice and not justice. Tlje English press has, it is 
 true, for many years been engaged in teaching us that we were little 
 better than thieves or pirates; but that press has been so uniformly and 
 unsparingly abusive of us, whenever we have.failed to grant all that it 
 has claimed, that its views are entitled to little weight. At home, many 
 of our authors have taken the same side of the question ; and the 
 only answer that has ever, to my knowledge, been made, has been, that 
 if we admitted the claims of foreign authors the prices of books would 
 be raised, and the people would be deprived -of their accustomed sup- 
 plies of cheap literature — as I think, a very weak sort of defence. If 
 
9 
 
 nothing better than this can be said, we may as well at once plead 
 guilty to the charge of piracy, and commence a new and more honest 
 course of action. Evil may not be done that good may come of it, 
 nor may we steal an author's brains that our people may be cheaply 
 taught. To admit that the end justifies the means, would be to adopt 
 the line of argument so often used by English speakers, in and out 
 of Parliament, when they defend the poisoning of the Chinese people 
 by means of opium introduced in defiance of their government, be- 
 cause it famishes revenue to India ; or that which teaches that Canada 
 should be retained as a British colony, because of the facility it affords 
 for the violation of our laws; or that which would have us regard 
 smugglers, in general, as the great reformers of the age. We stand 
 in need of no such morality as this. We can afford to pay for what 
 we want; but, even were it otherwise, our^ motto here, and every- 
 where, should be the old French one : " Fats ce que doy, advienne 
 que pcmrra" — Act justly, and leave the result to Providence. Before 
 acting, however, we should determine on which side justice lies. 
 Unless I am greatly in error, it is not on the side of international 
 copy-right. My reasons for this belief will now be given. 
 
 The facts or ideas contained in a book constitute its body. The 
 language in which they are conveyed to the reader constitute the 
 clothing of the body. For the first no copy-right is allowed. Hum- 
 boldt spent many years of his life in collecting facts relative to the 
 southern portion of this continent; yet so soon as he gave them to 
 the light they ceased to be his, and became the common property of 
 all mankind. Captain Wilkes and his companions spent several 
 years in exploring the southern ocean, and brought from there a vast 
 amount of new facts, all of which became at once common property. 
 Sir John Franklin made numerous expeditions to the north, during 
 which he collected many facts of high importance, for which he had 
 no copy-right. So with Park, Burkhard, ahd others, who lost their 
 lives in the exploration of Africa. Captain McClure has just accom- 
 plished the north-west passage, yet has he no exclusive right to the 
 publication of the fact. So has it ever been. For thousands of 
 years men like these — working men, abroad and at home — have been 
 engaged in the collection of facts; and thus there has been accumu- 
 lated a vast body of them, ail of which have become common pro- 
 perty, while even the names of most of the men by whom they were 
 collected have passed away. Next to these- come the men who have 
 been engaged in the arrangement of facts and in their comparison, 
 
10 
 
 with a view to deduce therefrom the laws' by which the world is 
 governed, and which constitute science. Copernicus devoted his life 
 to the study of numerous facts, by aid of which he was at length 
 enabled to give to the world a knowledge of the great fact that the 
 earth revolved around the sun; but he had therein, from the moment 
 of its publication, no more property than had the most violent of his 
 opponents. The discovery of 6ther laws occupied the life of Kepler, 
 but he had no property in them. ' Newton spent many years of his 
 life in the composition of his Prinoipia, yet in that he had no copy- 
 right, except for the mere clothing in which his ideas were placed 
 before the world. The body was common property. So, too, with 
 Bacon and Locke, Leibnitz and Descartes, Franklin, Priestley, and 
 Davy, Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smithy Lamarck and Cuvier, 
 and all other men who have aided in carrying science to the point at 
 which it has now arrived. They have had no property in their ideas. 
 If they labored, it was because they had a thirst for knowledge. 
 They could expect no pecuniary reward, nor had they much reason 
 even to hope for fame. New ideas were, necessarily, a subject of 
 controversy; and cases are, even in our time,3iot uncommon, in which 
 the announcement of an idea at variance with those commonly 
 recorded has tended greatly to the diminution of the enjoyment of 
 life by the man by whom it has been announced. The contempo- 
 raries of Harvey could scarcely be made to believe in the circula- 
 tion of the blood. Mr. Owen might have lived happily in the en- 
 joyment of a large fortune had he not conceived new views of 
 society. These he gave to the world in the form of a book, that led 
 him into controversy which has almost lasted out his life, while the 
 effort to carry his ideas into effect has cost him his fortune. Ad- 
 mit that he had been right, and that the correctness of his views 
 were now fully established, he would have in them no property 
 whatever; nor would his books be now yielding him a shilling, be- 
 cause later writers would be placing them before the world in other 
 and more attractive clothing. So is it with the books of all the men 
 I have named. The copy-right of the Prindpia would be worth 
 nothing, as would be the case with all that Franklin wrote on elec- 
 tricity, or Davy on chemistry. Few now read Adam Smith, and 
 still fewer Bacon, Leibnitz, or Descartes. Examine where we may, 
 we shall find that the collectors of the facts and the producers of the 
 ideas which constitute the body of books, have received little or no 
 
11 
 
 reward while thus engaged in contributing so largely to the augment- 
 ation of the common property of mankind. 
 
 For what, then, is copy-right given ? For the clothing in which 
 the body is produced to the world. Examine Mr. Macaulay's Sin- 
 tory of England, and you will find that the body is composed of what 
 is common property. Not only have the facts been recorded by 
 others, but the ideas, too, are derived from the works of men who 
 have labored for the world without receiving, and frequently without 
 the expectation of receiving, any pecuniary compensation for their 
 labors. Mr. Macaulay has read much and carefully, and he has thus 
 been enabled to acquire great skill in arranging and clothing his 
 facts ; but the reader of his books will find in them no contribution 
 to positive knowledge. The works of men who make contributions 
 of that kind are necessarily controversial and distasteful to the reader; 
 for which reason they find few readers, and never pay their authors. 
 Turn, now, to our own authors, Prescott and Bancroft, who have 
 furnished us with historical works of so great excellence, and you 
 will find a state of things precisely similar. They have taken a large 
 quantity of materials out of the common stock, in which you, and I, 
 and aU of us have an interest ; and those materials they have so re- 
 clothed as to render them attractive of pufchasers ; but this is all 
 they' have done. Look to Mr. Webster's works, and you will find it 
 the same. He was a great reader. He studied the Constitution 
 carefully, with a view to understand what were the views of its au- 
 thors, and those views he reproduced in different and more attract- 
 ive clothing, and there his work ended. He never pretended, as I 
 think, to furnish the world with any new ideas; and, if he had 
 done so, he could have claimed no property in them. Few now read 
 the heavy volumes containing the speeches of Fox and Pitt. They 
 did nothing but reproduce ideas that were common property, and in 
 such clothing as answered the purposes of the moment. Sir Robert 
 Peel did the same. The world would now be just as wise had he 
 never lived, for he made no contribution to the general stock of 
 knowledge. The great work of Chancellor Kent is, to use the words 
 of Judge Story, " but a new combination and arrangement of old 
 materials, in which the skill and judgment of the author in the selec- 
 tion and exposition, and accurate use of those materials, constitute 
 the basis of his reputation, as well as of his copy-right." The world 
 at large is the owner of all the facts that have been collected, and of 
 all the ideas that have been deduced from them, and its right in 
 
12 
 
 them is precisely the same that the planter has in the bale of cotton 
 that has been raised on his plantation ; and the course of proceeding of 
 both has, thus far, been precisely similar ; whence I am induced to 
 infer that, in both cases, right has been done. When the planter 
 hands his cotton to the spinner and the weaver, he does not say, 
 "Take this and convert it into cloth, and keep the cloth;" but he 
 does say, " Spin and weave this cotton, and for so doing you shall 
 have such interest in the cloth as will give you a fair compensation 
 for your labor and skill, but, when that shall have been paid, the 
 cloth will be mine." This latter is precisely what society, the owner 
 of facts and ideas, says to the author : " Take these raw materials 
 that have been collected, put them together, and clothe them after 
 your own fashion, and for a given time we will agree that nobody else 
 shall present them in the same dress. During that time you may 
 exhibit them for your own profit, but at the end of that period the 
 clothing will become common property, as the body now is. It is to 
 the contributions of your predecessors to our common stock that you 
 are indebted for the power to make your book, and we require you, 
 in your turn, to contribute towards the augmentation of the stock 
 that is to be used by your successors." Th^ is justice, and to grant 
 more than this would be injustice. 
 
 Let us turn now, for a moment, to the producers of works of 
 fiction. Sir Walter Scott had carefully studied Scottish and border 
 history, and thus had filled his mind with facts preserved, and ideas 
 produced, by others, which he reproduced in a different form. He 
 made no contribution to knowledge. So, too, with our own very 
 successful Washington Irving. He drew largely upon the com- 
 mon stock of ideas, and dressed them up in a new, and what has 
 proved to be a most attractive form. So, again, with Mr. Dickens. 
 Bead his Bleak House, and you will find that he has been a most 
 careful observer of men and things, and hasi thereby been enabled to 
 collect a great number of facts that he has dressed up in different 
 forms, but that is all he has done. He is in the condition of a man 
 who had entered a large garden and collected a variety of the most 
 beautiful flowers growing ^herein, of whichi he had made a fine bou- 
 quet. The owner of the garden would naturally say to him : " The 
 flowers are mine, but the arrangement is yours. You cannot keep 
 the bouquet, but you may smell it, or show it for your own profit, for 
 an hour or two, but then it must come to me. If you prefer it, I 
 am willing to pay you for your services, giving you a fair compen- 
 
13 
 
 sation for your time and taste." This is exactly what . society says 
 to Mr. Dickens, who makes such beautiful literary bouquets. What 
 is right in the individual, cannot be wrong in the mass of individuals 
 of which Boeiety is composed. Nevertheless, the author objects to 
 this, insisting that he is owner of the bouquet itself, although he has 
 paid no wages to the man who raised the flowers. Were he asked 
 to do so, he would, as I will show in another letter, regard it as lead- 
 ing to great injustice. 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 Let us suppose, now, that you should move, in the Senate, a reso- 
 lution looking to the establishment of the exclusive right of making 
 known the facts, or ideas, that might be brought to light, and see 
 what would be the effect. You would, as I think, find yourself at 
 once surrounded by the gentlemen who dress up those facts and ideas, 
 and issue them in the form of books. The geographer would say to 
 you : " My dear sir, this will never do. Look at my book, and you 
 will see that it is drawn altogether from the works of others, many 
 of whom have sunk their fortunes, while others have lost their lives, 
 in pursuit of the knowledge that I so cheaply communicate to the 
 world. You will find there the essence of the works of Humboldt, 
 and of Wilkes. All of Franklin's discoveries are there, and I am now 
 waiting only for the appearance of McClure's voyage in the arctic 
 regions to give a new edition of my book. Reflect, I beseech you; 
 upon what you are about to do. Very few persons have leisure to 
 read, or means to pay for the books of these travellers. A few hun- 
 dred copies are sufiicient to satisfy the demand, and then their works 
 die out. Of mine, on the contrary, the sale is ten, fifteen, or twenty 
 thousand annually, and thus is knowledge disseminated throughout 
 the world, enabling the men who furnish me with my facts to reap 
 a rich harvest of never dying fame. Grant them a copyright to the 
 new ideas they may supply to the world, and at once you put a stop 
 to the production of such books as mine, to my great injury and to 
 the loss of mankind at large. Facts and ideas are common property, 
 and their owners, the public, have a right to use them as they will." 
 
 The historian would say: "Mr. Senator, if you persist in this course, 
 you will never again see histories like mine. Here are hundreds 
 
14 
 
 of people scattered over the country, industriously engaged in dis- 
 interring facts relating to our early history. They are enthusiasts, 
 and many of them are very poor. Some of them contrive to publish, 
 in the form of books, the results of their researches, while others give 
 them to the newspapers, or to the historical societies, and thus they 
 are enabled to come before the world. Pew people buy such things, 
 and it not unfrequently happens that men who have spent their lives 
 in the collection of important facts, waste much of their small means 
 in giving them to an ungrateful nation. Nevertheless, they have 
 their reward in the consciousness that they are thus enabling others 
 to furnish the world with accurate histories of their country. I find 
 them of infinite use. They are my hewers of wood and drawers of 
 water, and they never look for payment for their labor. Deprive me 
 of their services, and I shall be obliged to abandon the production of 
 books, and return to the labors of my profession — and they will be 
 deprived of fame, while the public will be deprived of knowledge." 
 
 The medical writer would say : " Mr. Senator, should you succeed in 
 carrying out the idea with which you have commenced, you will, I 
 fear, be the cause of great injury to our profession, and probably of 
 great loss of life, for you will thereby arrest the dissemination of 
 knowledge. We have, here and abroad, thousands of industrious and 
 thoughtful men, more intent upon doing good than upon pecuniary 
 profit, who give themselves to the study of particular diseases, fur- 
 nishing the results to our journals, and not unfrequently publishing 
 monographs of the highest value. The sale of these is always small, 
 and their publication not unfrequently makes heavy drafts on the 
 small means of their authors. Such men are of infinite use to me, 
 for it is by aid of their most valuable labors that I have found myself 
 enabled to prepare the numerous and popular works that I have given 
 to the world. Look at them. There are several volumes of each of 
 which I sell thousands annually, to my great profit. Deprive me of 
 the power to avail myself of the brains of the working-men of the 
 profession, and my books will soon cease to be of any value, and I 
 shall lose the large income now realized from them, while the public 
 will sufi'er in their health by reason of the increased difficulty of dis- 
 seminating information." 
 
 The professor would ask you to look at his lectures and satisfy 
 yourself that they contained no single idea that had originated with 
 himself. "How," he would ask, "could these valuable lectures 
 have been produced, had I been deprived of the power to avail 
 
15 
 
 myself of the facts collected by the working-men, and the principles 
 deduced from them by the thinkers of the world ? I have no leisure 
 to collect facts or analyze them. For many years past these lectures 
 have yielded me a large income, and so will they continue to do, 
 provided I be allowed to do in future as in time past I have done, ap- 
 propriate to my own use all the new facts and new ideas I meet with, 
 crediting their authors or not, as I find it best to suit my purpose. 
 Abandon your idea, my dear sir; it cannot be carried out. The men 
 who work, and the men who think, must content themselves with 
 fame, and be thankful if the men who write books and deliver lec- 
 tures do not appropriate to themselves the entire credit of the facts 
 they use, and the ideas they borrow." 
 
 The teacher of natural science would say : " My friend, have you 
 reflected on what you are about to do ? Look at our collections, and 
 see how they have been enlarged within the last half century. Agia, 
 and Africa, and the islands of the Southern Ocean, have been traversed 
 by indefatigable men who, at the hazard of life, and often at the cost 
 of fortune, have quadrupled our knowledge' of vegetable and animal 
 life. Such men do not ask for compensation of any kind. They are 
 willing to work for nothing. Why, then, not let them ? Look at 
 the vast contributions to geological knowledge that have been made 
 throughout the Union by men who were content with a bare support, 
 and glad to have the results of their labors published, as they have 
 been, at the public cost. Such men ask no copy-right. When they 
 publish, it is almost always at a loss. Wilson lived and died poor. 
 So did Audubon, to whose labors we are indebted for so much orni- 
 thological knowledge. Morton expended a large sum in the pre- 
 paration and publication of his work on Crania. Agassiz did the 
 same with his great work on fishes. Cuvier had nothing but fame to 
 bequeath to his family. Lamarck's great work on the invertehratse 
 sold so slowly that very many years elapsed before the edition was 
 exhausted, but he would have found his reward had he lived to see 
 his ideas appropriated without acknowledgment, and reclothed by 
 the author of Vestiges of Creation, of which the sale has been so 
 large. This, my friend, is the use for which such men as Lamarck 
 and Cuvier were intended. They collect and classify the facts, and 
 we popularize them to our own profit. Look at my works and see, 
 bulky as they are, how many editions have been printed, and think 
 how profitable they must have been to the publisher and myself. 
 Look further, and see how numerous are the books to which my 
 
16 
 
 labors have indirectly given birth. See the manj school-books in 
 relation to botany and other departments of natural science, the 
 authors of which know little of what they undertake to teach, except 
 what they have drawn from me and others like myself. Ag^in, 
 see how numerous are the Fhra^ Emblems, and the Garlands 
 of Flowers, and the Flora's Dictionaries, and how large is their 
 sale — and how large must be the profits of those engaged in their 
 production. To recognize in such men as Cuvier and Lamarck the 
 existence of any right to either their facts or their deductions, would 
 be an act of .great injustice towards the race of literary men, while 
 most inexpedient as regards the world at large, now so cheaply sup- 
 plied with knowledge. As regards the question of international copy- 
 right now before the Senate, my views are different. Several of my 
 books have been published abroad, and my publisher here t«lls me, 
 that to prevent the republication of others, he is obliged to supply 
 them cheaply for foreign markets, and thus am I deprived of a fair 
 and just reward for my labors. Copy-right should be universal and 
 eternal, and such, I am persuaded, will be the result at which you 
 will arrive when you shall have thoroughly studied the subject." 
 
 Having studied it, and having given full c'onsideration to the views 
 that they and others had presented, your answer would probably be 
 to the following effect : " It is clear, gentlemen, from your own 
 showing, that there are two distinct classes of persons engaged in the 
 production of books' — the men who furnish the body, and those who 
 dress it up for production before the world. The first class are gene- 
 rally poor, and likely to continue so. They labor without any view 
 to pecuniary advantage. They are, too, very generally helpless. 
 Animated to their work solely by a desire to penetrate into the 
 secrets of nature, the character of their minds unfits them for mixing 
 in a money-getting world, while you are always in that world, ready 
 to enforce your claims to its consideration. As a consequence of this, 
 they are rarely allowed even the credit that is due to them. Their 
 discoveries become at once common property, to be used by men like 
 yourselves, and for your own individual profit. We have here among 
 ourselves a gentleman who has given to astronomy a new and highly 
 important law, essential to the perfection of the science, the discovery 
 of which has cost him the labor of a life, as a consequence of which 
 he is poor, and likely to remain so. Important as was his discovery, 
 his name is already so completely forgotten that there is probably not 
 a single one among you that can now recall it, and yet his law figures 
 
17 
 
 in the recent books. Is this right? Has he no claim to considera- 
 tion? 
 
 " In answer, you will say, that ' to admit the existence of any 
 such rights is not only impossible, but inexpedient, even if it were 
 possible. Knowledge advances by slow and almost imperceptible 
 steps, and each is but the precursor of a new and more important 
 one. Were each discoverer of a new truth to be authorized to mo- 
 nopolize the teaching of it, millions of men^ to whom, by our aid, it 
 is communicated, would remain in ignorance of it, and thus would 
 farther advance be prevented. In all times past, such truths have 
 been regarded as common property; and so,' you will add, 'they must 
 continue to be regarded. Eely upon it, the best interests of society 
 require that such be the case, however great the apparent injustice 
 to the discoverer.' " 
 
 " Here, you will observe, you waive altogether the question of 
 right which you so strongly enforce in regard to yourselves. It 
 may be that you have reason; but if so, how do you yourselves 
 stand in your relations with the great mass^ of human beings whose 
 right to this common property is equal with your own ? For thou- 
 sands of years, working men, collectors of facts and philosophers, 
 have been contributing to the common stock, and the treasure accu- 
 mulated is now enormously great; and yet the mass of mankind 
 remain still ignorant, and are poor, depraved, and wretched, because 
 ignorant. Under such circumstances, justice would seem to require 
 of the legislator that he should sanction no measure tending to throw 
 unnecessary difficulty in the way of the dissemination of knowledge. 
 To do so, would be to deprive the many of the power to profit by their 
 interest in the common property. To do soj would be to deprive the 
 men who have contributed to the accumulation of this treasure of 
 even the reward to which, as you admit, they justly may make a 
 claim. If they are to be satisfied with fame, we must do nothing 
 tending to limit the dissemination of their ideas, because to do so 
 would be to limit their power to acquire fame. If they are to be 
 satisfied with the idea of doing good to their fellow-men, we must 
 avoid everything tending to limit the knowledge of their discoveries, 
 because to do so would be to deprive them of much of their small 
 reward. The state of the matter is, as I conceive, as follows: On one 
 side of you stand the contributors to the vast treasure of knowledge 
 that mankind has accumulated, and is accumulating — men who have, 
 in general, labored without fee or reward; on the other side of you 
 2 
 
18 
 
 stand the owners of this vast treasure, desirous to have it fashioned 
 in a manner to suit their various tastes and powers, that all may be 
 enabled to profit by its possession. Between them stand yourselves, 
 middlemen between the producers and the consumers. It is your pro- 
 vince to combine the facts and ideas, as does the manufacturer when 
 he takes the raw materials of cloth, and, by aid of the skill of numerous 
 working men, past and present, elaborates them into the beautiful 
 forms that so much gratify our eyes in passing through the Crystal 
 Palace. For this service you are to be paid; but, to enable you to 
 receive payment, you need the aid of the legislator, as the common 
 law grants no more copy-right for the form in which ideas are expressed 
 than for the ideas themselves. In granting this aid, he is required to 
 see that, while he secures that you have justice, he does no injustice 
 to the men who produce the raw material of your books, nor to the 
 community, whose common property it is. In granting it, he is bound 
 to use his efforts to attain the knowledge needed for enabling him to do 
 justice to all parties, and not to you alone. The laws which elsewhere 
 govern the distribution of the proceeds of labor must apply in your 
 case with ^qual force. Looking at them, we see that, with the growth 
 of population and of wealth, there is everywhere a tendency to dimi- 
 nution in the proportion of the product that is allowed to the men 
 who stand between the producer and the consumer. In new settle- 
 ments trade is small, and the shopkeeper requires large profits to 
 enable him to live; and while the consumer pays a high price, the 
 producer is compelled to be content with a low one. In new settle- 
 ments the miller takes a large toll for the conversion of corn into 
 flour, and the spinner and weaver take a large portion of the wool as 
 their reward for converting the balance into cloth. Nevertheless, the 
 shopkeeper, the miller, the spinner, and the weaver are poor, because 
 trade is small. As wealth and population grow, we find the shop- 
 keeper gradually reducing his charge, until from fifty it falls to five 
 per cent. ; the miller reducing his, until he finds that he can afford to 
 give all the flour that is yielded by the corn, retaining for himself 
 only the bran; and the spinner and weaver contenting himself with a 
 constantly diminishing proportion of the wool; and now it is that We 
 find shopkeepers, millers, and manufacturers growrich, while consumers 
 are cheaply supplied, because of the vast increase of trade. In your 
 case, however, the course of proceeding has been altogether different. 
 Half a century since, when our people were but four millions in num- 
 ber, and were poor and scattered, gentlemen like you were secured in 
 
19 
 
 the monopoly of their works for fourteen years, with a pover of 
 renewal for a similar term. Twenty years since, when the population 
 had almost tripled, and their wealth had sixfold increased, and when 
 the facilities of distribution had vastly grown, the term was fixed at 
 twenty-eight years, with renewal to widow or children for fourteen 
 years mjre. At the present moment, you are secured in a monopoly 
 for forty-two years, among a population of twenty-six millions of 
 people, certain, at the close of twenty years more, to be fifty millions, 
 and likely, at the close of another half century, to be a hundred mil- 
 lions, and with facilities, for the disposal of your products, growing at 
 a rate unequalled in the world. With this Vast increase of market, 
 and increase of power over that market, the consumer should be sup- 
 plied more cheaply than in former , times, yet such is not the case. 
 The novels of Mrs. Rowson and Charles B. Brown, and the historical 
 works of Dr. Eamsay, persons who then stood in the first rank of 
 authors, sold as cheaply as do now the wcffks of Fanny Fern, the 
 Reveries of Ike Marvel, or the history of Mr. Bancroft; and yet, in 
 the period that has since elapsed, the cost of publication has fallen to 
 probably three-fourths. We have.here an inversion of the usual order of 
 things, and it is with these facts before us that you claim to have your 
 monopoly extended over another thirty millions of people; in con- 
 sideration of which our people are to grant to the authors of foreign 
 countries a monopoly of the privilege of supplying them with books 
 produced abroad. This application strikes me as unwise. It tends to 
 produce inquiry, and that will, probably, in its turn, lead rather to a 
 reduction than an extension of your privileges. Can it be supposed 
 that when, but a few years hence, our population shall have attained a 
 height of fifty millions, with a demand for books probably ten times 
 greater than at present, the community will be willing to continue to 
 you a monopoly, during forty-two years, of the right of presenting a 
 body that is common property, as a compensation for putting it in a 
 new suit of clothing? I doubt it much, and would advise you, for 
 your own good, to be content with what you have, ^sop tells us 
 that the dog lost his piece of meat in the attempt to seize a shadow, 
 and such may prove to be the case on this occasion. So, too, may 
 it be with the owners of patents. The discoverers of principles re- 
 ceive nothing, but those who apply them etjoy a monopoly created 
 by law for their use. Everybody uses chloroform, but nobody pays 
 its discoverer. The man who taught us how to convert India rub- 
 ber into clothing has not been allowed even fame, while our courts 
 
20 
 
 are incessantly occupied with the men who make the clothing. Pa- 
 tentees and producers of books are incessantly pressing upon Congress 
 with claims for enlargement of their privileges, and are thus pro- 
 ducing the effect of inducing an inquiry into the validity of their 
 claim to what they now enjoy. Be content, my friends; do not risk 
 the loss of a part of what you have in the effort to obtain more." 
 
 The question is often asked : Why should a man not have the same 
 claim to the perpetual enjoyment of his book that his neighbor has in 
 regard to the house he has built? The answer is, that the rights of 
 the parties are entirely different. The man who builds a house quar- 
 ries the stone and makes the bricks of whicli it is composed, or he 
 pays another for doing it for him. When finished, his house is all, 
 materials and workmanship, his own. The man who makes a book 
 uses the common property of mankind, and all he furnishes is the 
 workmanship. Society permits him to use its property, but it is on 
 condition that, after a certain time, the whole shall become a part of 
 the common stock. To find a parallel case, let it be supposed that 
 liberal men should, out of their earnings, place at the disposal of the 
 people of your town, stone, bricks, and lumbe.r, in quantity sufficient 
 to find accommodation for hundreds of people tha't were unable to 
 provide for themselves; next suppose that in this state of things your 
 authorities should say to any man or men, " Take these materials, 
 and procure lime in quantity sufficient to bujld a house; employ car- 
 penters, bricklayers, and architects, and then, in consideration of 
 having found the lime and the workmanship, you shall have a right 
 to charge your own price to every person who may, for all times, 
 desire to occupy a room in it" — would this; be doing justice to the 
 men who had given the raw materials for public use ? Would it be 
 doing justice to the community to whom they had been given ? 
 Would it not, on the contrary, be the height of injustice ? Unques- 
 tionably it would, and it would raise a storm that would speedily dis- 
 place the men who bad thus abused their trust. Their successors 
 
 would then say : " Messrs. , our predecessors did what they had 
 
 no right to do. These materials are common property. They were 
 given without fee or reward, with a view to benefit the whole people 
 of our town, many of whom are badly accommodated, while others 
 are heavily taxed to help those who are unable to help themselves. 
 To carry out the views of the benevolent men to whom we are in- 
 debted for all these stoije, bricks, and lumber, they must remain 
 common property. You may, if you will, convert them into a house, 
 
21 
 
 and, in consideration of the labor and skill required for so doing, we 
 ■will grant you, during a certain time, the privilege of letting the 
 rooma, at your own price, to those who desire to occupy them ; but 
 at the close of that time the building must become common property, 
 to be disposed of as we please." This is exactly what the community 
 says to the gentlemen who employ themselves in converting its com- 
 mon 'property into books, and to say more would be doing great 
 injustice. 
 
 The length of time for which the building should be thus granted 
 would depend upon the number of persons that would be likely to use 
 the rooms, and the prices they would be willing to pay. If lodgers 
 were likely to be few and poor, a long time would be required to be 
 given ; but if, on the contrary, the community were so large and pros- 
 perous as to render it certain that all the rooms would be occupied 
 every day in the year, and at such prices as would speedily repay the 
 labor and skill that had been required, the time allowed would be short. 
 Here, as we see, the course of things would be entirely different from 
 that which is observed in regard to books, the monopoly of which has 
 increased in length with the growth, in wealth and number, of the 
 customers, and is now attempted, by aid of international copy-right, 
 to be extended over millions of men who are yet exempt from its 
 operation. 
 
 The people of this country own a vast, quantity of wild land, which, 
 by slow degrees, acquires value, and that value is due to the contri- 
 butions of thousands and tens of thousands of people who are con- 
 stantly making roads towards them, and thus facilitating the exchange 
 of such commodities as may be raised from them. These lands are 
 common property, but the whole body of their owners has agreed that 
 whenever any one of their number desires to purchase out the interest 
 of his partners he may do so at $1 25 per acre. They do not give 
 him any of the common property; they require him to purchase and 
 pay for it. 
 
 With authors they pursue a more liberal course. They say: "We 
 have vast fields, in which hundreds of thousands of men have labored 
 for many centuries. They were at first wild lands, as wild as those 
 of the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains, but this vast body of 
 laborers his felled the trees and drained the swamps, and has thus 
 removed nearly all the difficulties that lay in the way of profitable 
 cultivation. They have also opened mines of incalculable richness; 
 mines of gold, silver, lead, copper, iron, and other metals, and all 
 
22 
 
 of these are common property. The men who executed these im- 
 portant works were our slaves, ill fed, worse clothed, and still worse 
 lodged; and thousands of the most laborious and useful of them have 
 perished of disease and starvation. Great as are the improvements 
 already made, their number is constantly increasing, for we continue 
 to employ such slaves — active, intelligent, and useful men — ^in ex- 
 tending them, and scarcely a day elapses that does not bring to light 
 some new discovery, tending greatly to increase the value of our com- 
 mon property. We invite you, gentlemen, to come and cultivate these 
 lands and work these mines. They are free to all. During the long 
 period of forty-two years you shall have the whole product of your 
 labor, and all we shall ask of you, at the close of that period, will be 
 that you will ledve behind the common property of which we are 
 now possessed, increased by the addition of such machinery as you 
 may yourselves have made. The corn that you may have extracted, 
 and the gold and silver that you may have mined during that long 
 period, will be the property of yourselves^ your wives, and your 
 children. We charge no rent for the use of the lands, no wages for 
 the labor of our slaves." Not satisfied with this, however, the per- 
 sons who work these rich fields and mines claim to be absolute, 
 owners, not only of all the gold and silver they extract, but of all 
 the machinery they construct out of the common property — and out 
 of this claim grows the treaty now before the Senate. 
 
 If justice requires the admission of foreigners to the enjoyment of 
 a monopoly of the sale of their books, it should be conceded at once 
 to all, and it should be declared that no book should be printed here 
 without the consent of its author, let him be Englishman, French- 
 man, German, Russian, or Hindoo. This would certainly greatly 
 increase the difficulty now existing in relation to the dissemination of 
 knowledge; but, if justice requires it, let it be done. Would it, 
 however, benefit the men who have real claims on our consideration? 
 Let us see. A German devotes his life to the study of the history 
 of his country, and at length produces a work of great value, but of 
 proportional size. Real justice says that hi? work may not be used 
 without his permission ; that the facts he has brought to light from 
 among the vast masses of original documents he has examined are his 
 property, and can be published by none others but himself. The legisla- 
 tion whose aid is invoked in the name of justice by literary men speaks, 
 however, very differently. It says : " This work is very cumbrous. 
 To establish his views, this man has gone into great detail. If trans- 
 
23 
 
 lated, his book will scarcely sell to such extent as to pay the labor. The 
 facts are common property. Out of this book you can make one that 
 will be much more readable, and that will sell^ for it will not be of more 
 than one-third the size. Take it, then, and extract all you need, and 
 you will do well. You will have, too, another advantage. Trans- 
 lation confers no reputation, but an original work, such as I now 
 recommend to you, will give you such a standing as may lead you on 
 to fortune. Few people know anything of the original work, and it 
 will not be necessary for you to mention that all your materials are 
 derived from it." On the other hand, a lady who has read the work 
 of this poor German finds in it an episode that she expands into a 
 novel, which sells rapidly, and shfe reaps at hcftne a large reward for her 
 labors ; while the man who gave her the idea starves in a garret. A 
 literary friend of the lady novelist, delighted with her success, finds in 
 his countryman's treasury of facts the material for a poem, out of which 
 he, too, reaps a harvest. Both of these are protected by international 
 copy-right, because they have furnished nothing hut the clothing of 
 ideas ; but the man who supplied them with the ideas finds that his 
 book is condensed abroad, and given to the public, perhaps, without 
 even the mention of his name. 
 
 The whole tendency of the existing system is to give the largest 
 reward to those whose labors are lightest, and the smallest to those 
 whose labors are most severe; and every extension of it must neces- 
 sarily look in that direction. The Mysteries of Paris were a fortune 
 to Eugene Sue, and Uncle Tom's Cabin has been one to Mrs. Stowe. 
 Byron had 2,000 guineas for a volume of Ghilde Harold, and 
 Moore 3,000 for his Lalla Rookh; aiid yet a single year should 
 have more than sufficed for the production of any one of them. 
 Under a system of international copyright, Dumas, already so 
 largely paid, would be protected, whereas Thierry, who sacrificed 
 his sight to the gratification of his thirst for knowledge, would 
 not. Humboldt, the philosopher par excellence of the age, would 
 not, because he furnishes his readers with things, and not with words 
 alone. Of the books that record his observations on this conti- 
 nent, but a part has, I believe, been translated into English, and of 
 these but a small portion has been republished in this country, 
 although to be had without claim for copy-right. In England their 
 sale has been small, and can have done little more than pay the cost 
 of translation and publication. Had it been- required to pay for the 
 privilege of translation, but a small part of even those which have 
 
24 
 
 been translated would probably have ever seen the light in any but 
 the language of the author. This great man inherited a handsome 
 property, which he devoted to the advancement of science, and what 
 has been his pecuniary reward may be seen in the following statement, 
 derived from an address recently delivered in New York : — 
 
 " There are now living in Europe two very distinguished men, barons, both 
 very eminent in their line, both known to the whole civilized world ; one is 
 Baron Kothschild, and the other Baron Humboldt; one distinguished for the 
 accumulation of wealth, the other for the accumulation of knowledge. What 
 are the possessions of the philosopher? Why, sir, I heard a gentleman whom 
 I have seen here this afternoon, say that, on a recent visit to Europe, he paid 
 his respects to that distinguished philosopher, and was admitted to an audi- 
 ence. He found him, at the age of 84 years, fresh and vigorous, in a small 
 room, nicely sanded, with a large deal table uncovered in the midst of that 
 room, containing his books and writing apparatus. Adjoining this, was a 
 small bed-room, in which he slept. Here this emitient philosopher received 
 a visitor from the United States. He conversed with him ; he spoke of his 
 works. "My works," said he, "you will find in the adjoining library, but I 
 am to poor to own a copy of them. I have not the means to buy a full copy 
 of my own works." 
 
 After having furnished to the gentlemen who produce books more 
 of the material of which books are composed than has ever been 
 furnished by any other man, this illustrious man finds himself, at 
 the close of life, altogether dependent on the bounty of the Prussian 
 government, which allows him, as I have heard, less than five hun- 
 dred dollars a year. In what manner, naw, would Humboldt be 
 benefited by international copy-right ? I know of none ; but it is 
 very plain to see that Dumas, Victor Hugo, and George Sand, might 
 derive from it a large revenue. In confirmation of this view, I would 
 ask you to review the names of the persons who urge most anxiously 
 the change of system that is now proposed, and see if you can find 
 in it the name of a single man who has dbne anything to extend 
 the domain of knowledge. I think you will not. Next look and 
 see if you do not find in it the names of those who furnish the world 
 with new forms of old ideas, and are largely paid for so doing. The 
 most active advocate of international copy-right is Mr. Dickens, who 
 is said to realize $50,000 per annum for the sale of works whose 
 composition is little more than amusement for his leisure hours. In 
 this country, the only attempt that has yet been made to restrict the 
 right of translation is in a suit now before the courts, for compensa- 
 tion for the privilege of converting into Gjerman a work that has 
 
25 
 
 yielded the largest compensation that the world has yet known for 
 the same quantity of literary labor. 
 
 We are constantly told that , regard to the interests of science re- 
 quires that we should protect and enlarge the rights of authors ; but 
 does science make any such claim for herself? I doubt it. Men 
 who make additions to science know well that they have, and can 
 have, no rights whatever. Cuvier died very poor, and all the copy- 
 right that could have been given to him or Humboldt would not 
 have enriched either of them. Laplace knew well that his great 
 work could yield him nothing. Our own Bowditoh translated it as a 
 labor of love, and left by his will the means required for its publi- 
 cation. The gentlemen who advocate the* interests of science are 
 literary men, who use the facts and ideas furnished by scientific men, 
 paying nothing for their use. Now, literature is a most honorable 
 profession, and the gentlemen engaged in it are entitled not only to 
 the respect and consideration of their fellow-men, but also to the 
 protection of the law ; but in granting it, the legislator is bound to 
 recollect, that justice to the men who furnish the raw materials of 
 the books, and justice to the community that owns those raw mate- 
 rials, require that protection shall not, either in, point of space or 
 time, be greater than is required for giving the producer of books a 
 full and fair compensation for his labor. How the present system 
 operates in regard to English and American authors, I propose to 
 consider in another letter. 
 
 LETTEE III, 
 
 We are assured that justice requires the admission of foreign au- 
 thors to the privilege of copy-right, and in support of the claim that 
 she presents are frequently informed of the extreme poverty of many 
 highly popular English writers. Mrs. Inchbald, so well known as the 
 author of the Simple Story, and other novels, as well as in her capa- 
 city of editor, dragged on, as we are told, to the age of sixty, a miser- 
 able existence, living always in mean lodgings'^ and suifering frequently 
 from want of the common comforts of life. Lady Morgan, so well 
 known as Miss Owenson, a brilliant and accomplished woman, is now 
 dependent altogether upon the public charity, administered in the 
 form of a pension of less than five hundred dollars a year. Mrs. 
 
26 
 
 Hemans, the universally admired poetess, lived- and died in poverty. 
 Laman Blanchard lost his senses and committed suicide in conse- 
 quence of being compelled, by his extreme poverty, to the effort of 
 writing an article for a periodical whilsr his wife lay a corpse in the 
 house. Miss Mitford, so well known to all of us, found herself, after 
 a life of close economy, so greatly reduced as to have been under the 
 necessity of applying to her American readers for means to extricate 
 her little property from the rude hands of the sheriff. Like Lady 
 Morgan, she is now a public pensioner. Leigh Hunt is likewise de- 
 pendent on the public charity. Tom Hood,' so well known by his 
 Song of a Shirt — the delight of his readers, and a mine of wealth to 
 his publishers ; a man without vices, and of untiring industry — lived 
 always from day to day on the produce of his labor. On his death- 
 bed, when his lungs were so worn with consumption that he could 
 breathe only through a silver tube, he was obliged to be propped up 
 with pillows, and, with shaking hand and dizzy head, force himself 
 to the task of amusing his readers, that he might thereby obtain 
 bread for his unhappy wife and children. With all his reputation, 
 Moore found it difficult to support his family, and all the comfort of 
 his declining years was due to the charity of his friend. Lord Lans- 
 downe. In one of his letters from Germany, Campbell expresses 
 himself transported with joy at hearing that a double edition of his 
 poems had just been published in London. " This unexpected fifty 
 pounds," says he, "saves me from jail." Haynes Bayley died in 
 extreme poverty. Similar statements are furnished us in relation to 
 numerous others who have, by the use of their pens, largely contri- 
 buted to the enjoyment and the instruction of the people of Great 
 Britain. It would, indeed, be difficult to find very many cases in 
 which it had been otherwise with persons exclusively dependent on 
 the produce of literary labor. With few and brilliant exceptions, 
 their condition appears to have been, and to be, one of almost hope- 
 less poverty. Scarcely anything short of this, indeed, would induce 
 the acceptance of the public charity that is occasionally doled out in 
 the form of pensions on the literary fund. 
 
 This is certainly an extraordinary state x>i things, and one that 
 makes to our charitable feelings an appeal t^at is almost irresistible. 
 Nevertheless, before giving way to these feelings, it woujd be proper 
 to examine into the real cause of all this poverty, with a view to 
 satisfy ourselves if real charity would carry us in the direction now 
 proposed. The skilful physician always studies the cause of disease 
 
, 27 
 
 before he determines on the remedy, and this course is quite as neces- 
 sary in prescribing for moral as for physical disorder. Failing to do 
 this, we might increase instead of diminishing the evil, and might find 
 at last that we had been taxing ourselves in Vain. 
 
 What is claimed by English authors is perpetuity and universality 
 of property in the clothing they supply for the body that is furnished 
 to the world by other and unpaid men ; and an examination of the 
 course of proceeding in that country for the last century and a half 
 shows that each step that has been taken has been in that direction. 
 While denying to the producers of facts and ideas any right whatever, 
 every act of legislation has tended to give; more and more control 
 over their dissemination to the men who appropriated them to their 
 own use, and brought them in an attractive form before the reader. 
 Early in the last century was passed an act well known as the statute 
 of Queen Anne, giving to authors fourteen years as the period during 
 which they were to have a monopoly of the peculiar form of words 
 they chose to adopt in coming before the world. The number of 
 persons then living in England and Wales, and subjected to that 
 monopoly, was about five millions. Since that time the field of its 
 operation has been enlarged, until it now embraces not only England 
 and Wales, but Scotland, Ireland, and the British colonies, con- 
 taining probably thirty-two millions of people who use the English 
 language. The time, too, has been gradually extended, until it now 
 reaches forty-two years, or thrice the period for which it was origi- 
 nally granted. Nevertheless, no life is more precarious than that of 
 an Englishman dependent upon literary pursuits for support. Such 
 men are almost universally poor, and leading men among them, Ten- 
 nyson and Sir Francis Head for instance, gladly accept the public 
 charity, in the form of pensions for less than five hundred dollars a 
 year. This is not a consequence of limitation in the field of action, 
 for that is six times greater than it was when Gay netted j£l,C0O 
 from a single opera, and Pope received £6,000 for his Homer ; five 
 times greater than when Fielding had ,£1,000 for his Amelia ; and 
 four times more than when Robertson had £4,500 for his Charles 
 v., Gibbon £5,000 for the second part of his history, and McPher- 
 son £1,200 for his Ossian.* Since that time money has become 
 greatly more abundant and less valuable; and if we desired to com- 
 
 * The several figures here given are from a staternent in a British journal. 
 Whether they are perfectly aoourate, or not, I have no means of determining. 
 
28 
 
 pare the reward of these authors with those of the present day, the 
 former should be trebled in amount, which would give Kobertson 
 more than sixty thousand dollars for a work that is comprised in 
 three 8vo. volumes of very moderate size. It is not a consequence 
 of limitation of time, for that has grown from fourteen to forty-two 
 years — more than is required for any book, except, perhaps, one in 
 five or ten thousand. It should not be a consequence of poverty in 
 the nation, for British writers assure us that wealth so much abounds 
 that wars are needed to prevent its too rapid growth, and that foreign 
 loans are indispensable for enabling the people of Britain to find an 
 outlet for all their vast accumulations. What, then, is the cause of 
 disease ? Why is it that in so wealthy a nation, literary men and 
 women arc so generally poor that it should be required to bring their 
 poverty before the world, to aid in the demand for an extension to 
 other countries of the monopoly so well secured at home ? In that 
 country, the fortunes of wealthy men count by millions, and, that 
 being the case, an average contribution of a shilling a head towards 
 paying for the copy-right of books, would seem to be the merest trifle 
 to be given in return for the pleasure and the instruction derived 
 from the perusal of the works of English authors, and yet even that 
 small sum does not appear to be paid. Thirty-two millions of shillings 
 would give almost eight millions of dollars; a sum sufficient to give 
 to six hundred authors more than thirteen thousand dollars a year, 
 being more than half the salary of the chief magistrate of our Union. 
 Admitting, however, that there were a thousand authors worthy to 
 be paid, and that would most certainly cover them all, it would give 
 to each eight thousand dollars, or one-third more than we have been 
 accustomed to allow to men who have devoted their lives to the 
 service of the public, and have at length risen to be secretaries of 
 State. If English authors were thus largely paid, it would be deemed 
 an absurdity to ask an enlargement of their monopoly; but, as they 
 are not thus paid, it is asked. There is pfobably but a single lite- 
 rary man in England that receives $8,000 a^ year for his labors, and 
 it may be doubted if it would be possible to name ten whose annual 
 receipts equal $6,000 ; while those of a vast majority of them are 
 under $1,500, and very many of them greatly under it. Even were 
 we to increase the number of authors to fifteen hundred, one to every 
 4000 males between the ages of 20 and GO in the kingdom, and to allow 
 them, on an average, $2,000 per annum, it Would require but three 
 millions of dollars to pay them, and that coujd be done by an average 
 
29 
 
 contribution of five pence per head of the population, a wonderfully 
 small amount to be paid for literary labor by a nation claiming to 
 be the wealthiest in the world. A shilling a head would give to the 
 whole fifteen hundred salaries nearly equal to those of our secretaries ; 
 and yet we see clever and industrious men, writers of eminence 
 whose readers are to be found in every part of the civilized world, 
 living on in hopeless poverty, and dying with the knowledge that 
 they are leaving widows and children to the' " tender mercies" of a 
 world in which they themselves have shone and starved. Viewing 
 all these facts, it may, I think, well be doubted if the annual contri- 
 butions of the people subject to the British copy-right act for the 
 support of the persons who produce their books, much exceeds three 
 pence, or six cents, per head; and here itds that we are to find the 
 real difficulty — one not to be removed by us. The home market is 
 the important one, whether for words or things, and when that is bad, 
 but little benefit can be derived from the foreign one ; and every 
 effort to extend the latter will, under such circumstances, be found to 
 result in disappointment. It can act only as a plaster to conceal the 
 sore, while the sore itself becomes larger and more dangerous from 
 day to day. To effect a cure, the sore itself must bo examined and 
 its cause removed. To cure the disease so prevalent among British 
 authors, we must first seek for the causes why the home market for 
 the products of their labor is so very small, and that will be found in 
 the steadily growing tendency towards centralization, so obvious in 
 every part of the operations of the British empire. Centralization 
 and civilization have in all countries, and at all periods of the world, 
 been opposed to each other, and that such is here the case can, I 
 think, readily be shown. 
 
 Among the earliest cases in which this tendency was exhibited was 
 that of the Union by which the kingdom of Scotland was reduced to 
 the condition of a province of England, and Edinburgh, from being 
 the capital of a nation, to becoming a mere provincial town. By 
 many and enlightened Scotchmen a federal union would have been 
 preferred ; but a legislative one was formed, and from that date the 
 whole public revenue of Scotland tended towards London, towards 
 which tended also, and necessarily, all who sought for place, power, 
 or distinction. An absentee government produced, of course, absentee 
 landholders, and with each step in this direction there was a dimi- 
 nution in the demand at home for talent, which thenceforward sought 
 a market in the great city to which the rents were sent. The connec- 
 
30 
 
 tion between the educated classes of Scotland and the Scottish seats of 
 learning tended necessarily to decline, while the connection between 
 the former and the universities of England became more intimate. 
 These results were, of course, gradually produced, but, as is the case 
 with the stone as it falls towards the earth, the attraction of centrali- 
 zation grew with the growth of the city that was built out of the 
 contributions of distant provinces, while the counteracting power of 
 the latter as steadily declined, and the greater the decline the more 
 rapid does its progress now become. Seventy years after the date of 
 the Union, fidinburgh was still a great literary capital, and could 
 then offer to the world the names of numerous men of whose repu- 
 tation any country of the world might have been proud: Burns 
 and McPherson; Eobertson and Hume; Blair and Kames; Eeid, 
 Smith, and Stewart; Monboddo, Playfair, and Boswell; and nu- 
 merous others, whose reputation has survived to the present day. 
 Thirty-five yeai's later, its press furnished the world with the 
 works of Jeffrey and Brougham; Stewart, Brown, and Chalmers; 
 Scott, Wilson, and Joanna Baillie ; and with those of many others 
 whose reputation was less widely spread, among whom were Gtalt, 
 Hogg, Lookhart, and Miss Ferrier, the authoress of Marriage. The 
 Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine then, to a great ex- 
 tent, represented Scottish men and Scottish modes of thought. Look- 
 ing now on the same field of action, it is difficult, from this distance, 
 to discover more than two Scottish authors, Alison and Sir William 
 Hamilton, the latter all " the more conspicuous and remarkable, as 
 he now," says the North British Review (Feb. 1853), "stands so 
 nearly alone in the ebb of literary activity in Scotland, which has 
 been so apparent during this generation." McCulloch and Macaulay 
 were both, I believe, born in Scotlandj but in all else they are Eng- 
 lish. Glasgow has recently presented the wiorld with a new poet, in 
 the person of Alexander Smith, but, unlike Ramsay and Burns, 
 there is nothing Scottish about him beyond his place of birth. " It 
 is not," says one of his reviewers, " Scottish scenery, Scottish his- 
 tory, Scottish character, and Scottish social humor, that he repre- 
 sents or depicts. Nor is there," it continues, " any trace in him of 
 that feeling of intense nationality so common in Scottish writers. 
 London," as it adds, " a green lane in Kent, an English forest, an 
 English manor-house, these are the scenes where the real business of 
 the drama is transacted."* 
 
 * North British Eeyiew, Aug. 1853. 
 
31 
 
 The Edinhirgh Review has become to all intents and purposes an 
 English journal, and Blackwood has lost all those oharacteristies by 
 which it ■was in former times distinguished from the magazines pub- 
 lished south of the Tweed. 
 
 Seeing these facts, we can scarcely fail to agree with the review 
 already quoted, in the admission that there are "probably fewer 
 leading individual thinkers and literary guides in Scotland at present 
 than at any other period of its history since the early part of the last 
 century," since the day when Scotland itself lost its individuality. 
 The same journal informs us that " there is now scarcely an instance 
 of a Scotchman holding a learned position in any other country," and 
 farther says that " the small number of names of literary Scotchmen 
 known throughout Europe for eminence in literature and science is 
 of itself sufficient to show to how great an extent the present race of 
 Scotchmen have lost the position which their ancestors held in the 
 world of letters."* 
 
 How, indeed, could it be otherwise ? Centralization tends to carry • 
 to London all the wealth and all the expenditure of the kingdom, 
 and thus to destroy everywhere the local demand for books or news- 
 papers, or for men capable of producing either. Centralization taxes 
 the poor people of the north of Scotland, and their complaints of dis- 
 tress are answered by an order for their expulsion, that place may be 
 tnade for sheep and shepherds, neither of whom make much demand 
 for books. Centralization appropriates millions for the improvement 
 of London and the creation of royal palaces and pleasure-grounds in 
 and about that city, while Holyrood, and all other of the buildings 
 with which Scottish history is connected, are allowed to go to ruin. 
 Centralization gives libraries and museums to London, but it refuses 
 the smallest aid to the science or literature of Scotland. Centrali- 
 zation deprives the people of the power to educate themselves, by 
 drawing from them more than thirty millions of dollars, raised by 
 taxation, and it leaves the professors in the colleges of Scotland in 
 the enjoyment of chairs, the emoluments , of many of which are but 
 $1,200 per annum. Whence, then, can come the demand for books, 
 or the power to compensate the people who make them? Not, 
 assuredly, from the mass of unhappy people who occupy the High- 
 lands,' whose starving condition furnishes so frequent occasion for the 
 comments of their literary countrymen ; nor, as certainly, from the 
 wretched inhabitants of the wynds of Glasgow, or from the weavers 
 
 * Ibid. May, 1853. 
 
32 
 
 of Paisley. Centralization is gradually separating the people into 
 two classes — the very rich, who live in London, and the very poor, 
 who remain in Scotland; and with the progress of this division there 
 is a gradual decay in the feeling of national pride, that formerly so 
 much distinguished the people of Scotland. The London Leader 
 tells its readers that " England is a power made up of conquests over 
 nationalities;" and it is right. The nationality of Scotland has dis- 
 appeared; and, however much it may annoy our Scottish friends* to 
 have the energetic and intelligent Celt sunk in the " slow and unim- 
 pressible" Sason, such is the tendency of English centralization, 
 everywhere destructive of that national feeling which is essential to 
 progress in civilization. 
 
 If we look to Ireland, we find a similar state of things. Seventy 
 years since that country was able to insist upon and to establish its 
 claim for an independent government, and, by aid of the measures 
 then adopted, was rapidly advancing. From that period to the close 
 of the century, the demand for books for Ireland was so great as to 
 warrant the republication of a large portion of those produced in 
 England. The Idngdom of Ireland of that day gave to the world 
 such men as Burke and Grrattan, Moore and Edgeworth, Curran, 
 Sheridan, and Wellington. Centralization, however, demanded that 
 Ireland should become a province of England, and from that time 
 famines and pestilences have been of frequent occurrence, and the 
 whole population is now being expelled to make rpom for the "slow 
 and unimpressible" Saxon race. Under these circumstances, it is 
 matter of small surprise that Ireland not only produces no books, but 
 that she furnishes no market for those produced "by others. Half a 
 century of international copy-right has almost annihilated both the 
 producers and the consumers of books. 
 
 Passing towards England, we may for a moment look to Wales, 
 and then, if we desire to find the effects of centralization and its con- 
 sequent absenteeism, in neglected schools, ignorant teachers, decaying 
 and decayed churches, and drunken clergymen with immoral flocks, 
 our object will be accomplished by studying} the pages of the Edvw- 
 hurgh Eeview.f In such a state of things as is there described there 
 can be little tendency to the development of intellect, and little of 
 either ability or inclination to reward the authors of books. In my 
 next, I will look to England herself. 
 
 * See Blackwood's Magazine, Sept. 1858, art. "Scotland since the Union." 
 f April, 1853, art. "The Church in the Mountains." 
 
33 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 Arrived in England, we find there everywhere the same tendency 
 towards centralization. Of the 200,000 small landed proprietors of 
 the days of Adam Smith but few remain, and of even those the 
 number is gradually diminishing. Great landed estates have every- 
 where absentees for owners, agents for managers, and day laborers 
 for workmen. The small landowner was a resident, and had a per- 
 sonal interest in the details of the neighborhood, not now felt by 
 either the owner or the laborer. This state of things existed to a 
 considerable extent five-and-thirty years ago, but it has since grown 
 with great rapidity. At that time Great Britain could exhibit to the 
 world perhaps as large a body of men and women of letters, with 
 world-wide reputation, as ever before existed in any country or 
 nation, as will be seen from the following list : — 
 
 Byron, 
 
 Wilson, 
 
 Clarkson, 
 
 Moore, 
 
 Hallam, 
 
 Landor, 
 
 Scott, 
 
 Eoscoe, 
 
 Wellington,* 
 
 Wordsworth, 
 
 Malthus, 
 
 Robert Hall, 
 
 Rogers, 
 
 Ricardo, 
 
 Taylor, 
 
 Campbell, 
 
 Mill, 
 
 Romilly, 
 
 Joanna Baillie, 
 
 Chalmers, 
 
 Edgeworth, 
 
 Southey, 
 
 Coleridge, 
 
 Hannah More, 
 
 Gifford, 
 
 Ileber, 
 
 Dalton, 
 
 Jeffrey, 
 
 Bentham, 
 
 Davy, 
 
 Sidney Smith, 
 
 Brown, 
 
 Wollaston, 
 
 Brougham, 
 
 Mackintosh, 
 
 The Herschels 
 
 Horner, 
 
 Stewart, 
 
 Dr. Clarke. 
 
 De Qdncey was then just coming on the stage. Crabbe, Shelley, 
 Keats, Croly, Hazlitt, Lockhart, Lamb, Hunt, Gait, Lady Morgan, 
 Miss Mitford, Horace Smith, Hook, Milman, Miss Austeil, and a host 
 of others, were already on it. Many of these appear to have received 
 rewards far greater than fall now to the lot of some of the most distin- 
 guished literary men. Crabbe is said to have received 3,000 guineas, 
 or $16,000, for his Tales of the Hall, and Theodore Hook 2,000 
 guineas for Sayings and Doings; and, if the facts were so, they prove 
 
 * Wellington's dispatches place him in the first rank of historians. 
 3 
 
34 
 
 that poets and novelists were far more valued then than now. At 
 that time, Croker, Barrow, and numerous other men of literary repu- 
 tation, co-operated with Southey and Gifford in providing for the 
 pages of the Quarterly. All these^ men and women, were the pro- 
 duct of the last century, when the small landholders of England yet 
 counted by hundreds of thousands. 
 
 Since then, centralization has made great progress. The land- 
 holders now amount, as we are informed, to only 30,000, and the 
 gulf which separates the great proprietors from the cultivator has 
 gradually widened, as the one has become more an absentee and the 
 other more a day laborer. The greater the tendency towards the 
 absorption of land by the wealthy banker and merchant, or the 
 wealthy cotton-spinner, like Sir Robert Peel; the greater is the tend- 
 ency towards its abandonment by the small proprietor, who has an 
 interest in local self-g(5vernment, and the greater the tendency to- 
 wards the centralization of power in London and in the great seats of 
 manufacture. In all those places, it is thought that the prosperity 
 of England is dependent upon " a cheap and abundant supply of 
 labor."* The Timei assures its readers that it is " to the cheap 
 labor of Ireland that England is indebted for all her great works;" 
 and that note is repeated by a large portion of the literary men of 
 England who now ask for protection in the American market against 
 the effects of the system they advocate. 
 
 The more the people of Scotland can be driven from the land to 
 take refuge in Glasgow and Paisley, the cheaper must be labor. 
 The more those of Ireland can be driven to England, the greater 
 must be the competition in the latter for employment, and the lower 
 must be the price of labor. The more the land of England can be 
 centralized, the greater must be the mass of people seeking employ- 
 ment in London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, and the 
 cheaper must labor be. 
 
 Low-priced laborers cannot exercise self-government. All they 
 earn is required for supplying themselves with indifferent food, clothing, 
 and lodging, and they cannot control the expenditure of their wages 
 to such an extent as to enable them to educate their children, and 
 hence it is that the condition of the people; of England is as here 
 described ; — 
 
 " About one-half of our poor can neither read nor -write. The test of 
 signing the name at marriage is a very imperfect absolute test of cdu(iation, 
 
 * North British Review, Noyember, 1852. 
 
35 
 
 but it is a very good relative one : taking that test, how stands Leeds itself in 
 the Kegistrar-General's returns ? In Leeds, -which is tho centre of the move- 
 ment for letting education remain as it is, left entirely to chance and charity 
 to supply its deficiencies, how do we find the fact? This, that in 1846, the 
 last year to which these returns are brought down, of 1,850 marriages cele- 
 brated in Leeds and Huuslet, 508 of the men and 1,020 of the women, or 
 considerably more than one-half of the latter, signed their names with marks. 
 ' I have also a personal knowledge of this fact — that of 47 men employed 
 upon a railway in this immediate neighborhood,* only 14 men can sign their 
 names in the receipt of their wages ; and this not because of any diffidence 
 on their part, but positively because they cannot write.' And only lately, 
 the Leeds Mercury itself gave a, most striking instance of ignorance among 
 persons from Boeotian Pudsey : of 12 witnesses, ' all of respectable appear- 
 ance; examined before the Mayor of Bradford at the court-house there, only 
 one man could sign his name, and that indifferently.' Mr. Neison has clearly 
 shown, in statistics of crime in England and Wales ft-om 1834 to 1844, 
 that crime is invariably the most prevalent in those districts where the 
 fewest numbers in proportion to the population, can read and write. Is it 
 not, indeed, beginning at the wrong end to try and reform men after they 
 have become criminals? Yet you cannot begin with children, from Want of 
 schools. Poverty is the result of ignorance, and then ignorance is again the 
 unhappy result of poverty.. ' Ignorance makes men improvident and thought- 
 less — women as well as men ; it makes them blind to the future — to the future 
 of this life as well as the life beyond. It makeSi them dead to higher plea- 
 sures than those of the mere senses, and keeps them down to the level of the 
 mere animal. Hence the enormous extent of drunkenness throughout this 
 country, and the frightful waste of means which it involves.' At Bilston, 
 amidst 20,000 people, there are but two struggling schools — one has lately 
 ceased ; at MillenhaU, Darlaston, and Pelsall, amid a teeming population, no 
 school whatever. In Oldham, among 100,000, but. one public day-school for 
 the laboring classes ; the others are an infant-school, and some dame and 
 factory schools. At Birmingham, there are 21,824 children at school, and 
 23,176 at no school ; at Liverpool, 50,000 out of 90,000 at no school ; at Lei- 
 cester, 8,200 out of 12,500 ; and at Leeds itself, in 1841 (the date of the latest 
 returns), some 9,600 out of 16,400 were at no school whatever. It is the 
 same in the counties. ' I have seen it stated that a woman for some time 
 had to officiate as clerk in a church in Norfolk, there being no adult male 
 in the parish able to read and write.' Por a population of 17,000,000 we 
 have but twelve normal schools ; while in Massachusetts they have three 
 such schools for only 800,000 of population." 
 
 Poverty and ignorance produce intemperance and crime, and hence 
 it is that crime so much abounds throughout England. Infanticide, 
 as we are told, prevails to an extent unknown in any other part of 
 the world. Looking at all these facts, we can readily see that the 
 local demand for information throughout England must be very small, 
 and this enables us to account for the extraordinary fact, that in all 
 
36 
 
 that country there has been no daily newspaper printed out of Lon- 
 don. There is, consequently, no local demand for literary talent. 
 The weekly papers that are published require little of the pen, but 
 much of the scissors. The necessary consequence of this is, that 
 every young man who fancies he can write must go to London 
 to seek a channel through which he may be enabled to come before 
 the public. Here we have centralization again. Arrived in London, 
 he finds a few daily papers,, but only one, as we are told, that pays 
 its expenses, and around each of them is a corps of writers and edit- 
 ors as ill-disposed to permit the introduction of any new laborers in 
 their field as are the street-beggars of London to permit any inter- 
 ference with their "beat." If he desires to become contributor to the 
 magazines, it is the same. To obtain the privilege of contributing 
 his " cheap labor" to their pages, he must be well introduced, and if 
 he makes the attempt without such introduction, he is treated with a 
 degree of insolence scarcely to be imagined by any one not fami- 
 liar with the "answers to correspondents" in London periodicals. 
 If disposed to print a book, he finds a very limited number of pub- 
 lishers, each one surrounded with his corps of authors and editors, 
 and generally provided with a journal in which to have his own 
 books well placed before the world. If, now, he succeeds in gaining 
 favorable notice, he finds that he can obtain but a very small pro- 
 portion of the price of his book, even if it sell, because centraliza- 
 tion' requires that all books shall be advertised in certain London 
 journals that charge their own prices, and thus absorb the proceeds 
 of DO inconsiderable portion of the edition. Next, he finds that the 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer requires a share of the proceeds of the 
 book for permission to use paper, and the permission to advertise his 
 work when printed.* If he inquires to what purpose are devoted the 
 proceeds of all these taxes, he learns that the centralization which 
 it is the object of the British cheap-labor policy to establish, requires 
 the maintenance of large armies and large fleets, that absorb more 
 than all the profits of the commerce they protect. The bookseller 
 informs him that he must take the risk of finding paper, and of pay- 
 ing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Times and numerous 
 other journals — and that every editor will expect a copy, and that 
 the interests of science require that he, poor as he is, shall give no 
 less than eleven copies to the public ; and that the most that can be 
 
 * The tax on advertisements haa just now been repealed, but that tax was 
 a small one when compared with that imposed by centralization. 
 
sr 
 
 hoped for from the first edition of his book is, that it will not bring 
 him in debt. His book appears, but the price is high, for the rea- 
 sons that the taxes are heavy, and the general demand for books is 
 small. Cheap laborers cannot buy books ; soldiers and sailors can- 
 not buy books ; and thus does centralization diminish the market for 
 literary talent while increasing the cost of bringing it before the 
 world. Centralization next steps in in the shape of circulating libra- 
 ries, that, for a few guineas a year, supply books throughout the king- 
 dom, and enable hundreds of copies to do the work that should be 
 done by thousands, and hence it is that, while-first editions of English 
 books are generally small, so very few of them ever reach second ones. 
 Popular as was Captain Marryat, the first editions of his books were, 
 as he himself informed me, for some time only 1,500, and had not 
 then risen above 2,000. Of Mr. Bulwer's novels, so universally po- 
 pular, the first edition never exceeded 2,500; and so it has been, and 
 is, with others. With all Mr. Thackeray's popularity, the sale of his 
 books has, I believe, rarely gone beyond 6,000 for the supply of 
 above thirty millions of people. Occasionally, a single author is 
 enabled to fix the attention of the public, and he is enabled to make 
 a fortune — not from the sale of large quantities at low prices, but of 
 moderate quantities at high prices. The chief case of the kind now in 
 England is that' of Mr. Dickens, who sells for twenty shillings a book 
 that costs about four shillings and sixpence to make, and charges his 
 fellow-laborers in the field of literature an enormous price for the 
 privilege of attaching to his numbers the" advertisements of their 
 works, as is shown in the following paragraph from one of the journals 
 of the day : — 
 
 " Thus far, no writer has succeeded in drawing so large pecuniary profits 
 from the exercise of his talents as Charles Dickens. His' last romance, JBIeak 
 Souse, ■which appeared in monthly numbers, had so wide a circulation in that 
 form that it became - valuable medium for advertising, so that before its 
 close, the few pages of the tale were completely lost in sheets of advertisements 
 which were stitched to them. The lowest price for such an advertisement was 
 £1 sterling, and many were paid for at the rate of £5 and £6. From this 
 there is nothing improbable in the supposition fliat, in addition to the large 
 sum received for the tale, its author gained some £15,000 by his advertising 
 sheets. The Rouaehold Words produces an income of about £4,000, though 
 Dickens, having put it entirely in the hands of an assistant editor, has nothing 
 to do with it beyond furnishing a weekly article^ Through his talents alone 
 he has raised himself from the position of a newspaper reporter to that of a 
 literary Croesus." 
 
 Centralization produces the " cheap and abundant supply of labor" 
 
38 
 
 required for the maintenance of the Britishr manufacturing system, 
 and " cheap labor" furnishes Mr. Dickens with his Oliver Twist, his 
 Tom-all-alone' s, and the various other characters and situations, by 
 aid of whose delineation he is enabled, as s German writer informs 
 us, to have dinners 
 
 "At whioli the highest aristocracy is glad to be present, and where he 
 equals them in wealth, and fm-nishes an intellectual banquet of wit and wis- 
 dom which they, the highest and most refined circles, cannot imitate." 
 
 Centralization enables Mr. Dickens to obtain vast sums by adver- 
 tising the works of the poor authors by whom he is surrounded, moat 
 of whom are not only badly paid, but insolently treated, while even 
 of those whose names and whose works are well known abroad many 
 gladly become recipients of the public charity. In the zenith of her 
 reputation. Lady Charlotte Bury received, as I am informed, but £200 
 ($960) for the absolute copy-right of works that sold for $7 50. Lady 
 Blessington, celebrated as she was, had but from three to four hun- 
 dred pounds ; and neither Marryat nor Bulwer ever received, as I 
 believ^, the selling price of a thousand copies of their books as com- 
 pensation for the copy-right.* Such being the facts in regard to 
 well-known authors, some idea may be formed in relation to the com- 
 pensation of those who are obscure. The whole tendency of the 
 " cheap labor" system, so generally approved by English writers, is 
 to destroy the value of literary labor by increasing the number of 
 persons who mii&t look, to the pen for the means of support, and by 
 diminishing the market for its products. What has been the effect 
 of the system will now be shown by placing 'before you a list of the 
 names of all the existing British authors whose reputation can be 
 regarded as of anj wide extent, as follows : — ■ 
 
 Tennyson, Thackeray, Grote, McCulloch, 
 
 Carlyle, Bulwer, Macaulay, Hamilton, 
 
 Dickens, Alison, J. S. Mill, Paraday. 
 
 This list is very small as compared with that presented in the 
 same field five-and-thirty years since, and its difference in weight is 
 still greater than in number. Scott, the novelist and poet, may cer- 
 tainly be regarded as the counterpoise of much more than any one of 
 the writers of fiction in this list. Byron, Moore, Rogers, and Camp- 
 bell enjoyed a degree of reputation far exceeding that of Tennyson. 
 Wellington, the historian of his own campaigns, would much out- 
 
 * This I had from Capt. Marryat himself. 
 
S9 
 
 weigh any of tlie historians. Malthus and Kicardo were founders of 
 a school that has greatly influenced the policy of the world, whereas 
 McCulloch and Mill are hut disciples in that school. Dalton, Davy, 
 and Wollaston will probably occupy a larger space in the history of 
 science than Sir Michael Faraday, large, even, as may he that 
 assigned to him. 
 
 Extraordinary as is the existence of such a state of things in a 
 country claiming so much to abound in wealth, it is yet more extra- 
 ordinary that we look around in vain to see who are to replace even 
 these when age or death shall withdraw them from the literary world. 
 Of all here named, Mr. Thackeray is the only one that has risen to 
 reputation in the last ten years, and he is. no longer young; and even 
 he seeks abroad that reward for his efforts which is denied to him by 
 the "cheap labor" system at home. Of the others, nearly, if not 
 quite all, have been for thirty years before the world, and, in the 
 natural course of things, some of them must disappear from the stage 
 of authorship, if not of life. If we seek their successors among the 
 writers for the weekly or monthly journals, we shall certainly fail to 
 find them. Looking to the Reviews, we find ourselves forced to agree 
 with the English journalist, who informs his readers that "it is said, 
 and with apparent justice, that the quarterlies are not as good as they 
 were." From year to year they have less the appearance of being 
 the productionof men who looked to anything beyond mere pecuniary 
 compensation for their labor. In reading them, we find ourselves 
 compelled to agree with the reviewer, who regrets to see that the 
 centralization which is hastening the decline of the Scottish univer- 
 sities is tending to cause the mind of the whole youth of Scotland to be 
 
 " Cast in tlie mould of English mnversitles, iilstitutions which, from their 
 very completeness, exercise on second-rate minds an influence unfavorable to 
 originality and power of thought." — North British Eeview, May 1853. 
 
 Their pupils are, as he says, struck " with one mental die," than 
 which nothing can be less favorable to literary or scientific develop- 
 ment. 
 
 Thirty years since. Sir Humphrey Davy spoke with his countrymen 
 as follows : — 
 
 "There are very few persons who pursue science with true dignity; it is 
 followed more as connected with objects of profit than fame." — Consolation in 
 Travel. 
 
 Since then. Sir John Herschel has said to them : — 
 
 " Here whole branches of continental study are unstudied, and indeed almost 
 
40 
 
 nuknown by name. It is in rain to conceal the melancholy truth. We are fast 
 dropping behind." — TreatUe on Sound. 
 
 A late writer, already quoted, says that learning is in disrepute. 
 The English people, as he informs us, have 
 
 " No longer time or patience for the luxury of a learned treatment of their 
 interests ; and a learned lawyer or statesman, instead of being eagerly sought 
 for, is shunned as an impediment to public business." — North BritiaJi Review. 
 
 The reviewer is, as he informs us, "far from regarding this tend- 
 ency, unfavorable as it is to present progress, as a sign of social 
 retrogression." He thinks that 
 
 " Reference to general principles for rules of immediate action on the part 
 of those actually engaged in the dispatch of business, must, from the delay 
 ■which it necessarily occasions, come to be regarded as a worse evil than 
 action which is at variance with principle altogether." 
 
 Demand tends to produce supply. Destroy the demand, and the 
 supply will cease. Science, whether natural or social, is not in 
 demand in G-reat Britain, and hence the diminution of supply. We 
 have here the secret of literary and scientific decline, so obvious to 
 all who study English books or journals, or read the speeches of 
 English statesmen. Empiricism prevails everywhere, and there is a 
 universal disposition to avoid the study of principles. The " cheap 
 labor" system, which it is the object of the- whole British policy to 
 establish, cannot be defended on principle, and therefore principles 
 are avoided. Centralization, cheap labor, and enslavement of the 
 body and the mind, travel aMays in company, and with each step of 
 their progress there is an increasing tendency towards the accumu- 
 lation of power in the hands of men who should be statesmen, the 
 difficulties of whose positions forbid, however, that they should refer 
 to scientific principles for their government. Action must be had, 
 and immediate action in opposition to principle is preferable to delay ; 
 and hence it is that real statesmen are " shtinned as an impediment 
 to public business." The greater the necessity for statesmanship, 
 the more must statesmen be avoided. The nearer the ship is brought 
 ' to the shoal, the more carefully must her captain avoid any reference 
 to the chart. That such is the practice of those charged with the 
 direction of the affairs of England, and such the philosophy of those 
 who control her journals, is obvious to all who study the proceedings 
 of the one or the teachings of the other. From year to year the ship 
 becomes more difficult of management, and ihere is increasing diffi- 
 
41 
 
 culty in finding responsible men to tate the helm. Such are the 
 effects upon mind that have resulted from that " destruction of 
 nationalities" required for the perfection of the British system of 
 centralization. 
 
 England is fast becoming one great shop, and traders have, in 
 general, neither time nor disposition to cultivate literature. The 
 little proprietors disappear, and the day laborers who succeed them 
 can neither educate their children nor purchase books. The great 
 proprietor is an absentee, and he has little time for either literature 
 or science. Prom year to year the population of the kingdom be- 
 comes more and more divided into tvro great classes; the very poor, 
 with whom food and raiment require all the proceeds of labor, and 
 the very rich who prosper by the cheap labor system, and therefore 
 eschew the study of principles. With the orfe class, books are an 
 unattainable luxury, while with the other the absence of leisure pre- 
 vents th^ growth of desire to purchase them. The sale is, therefore, 
 small; and hence it is that authors are badly paid. In strong con- 
 trast with the limited sale of English books at home, is the great 
 extent of sale here, as shown in the following facts : Of the octavo 
 edition of the Modern British Essayists, there have been sold in five 
 years no less than 80,000 volumes. Of Macaulay's Miscellanies, 3 
 vols. 12mo., the sale has amounted to 60,000 volumes. Of Miss 
 Aguilar's writings, the sale, in two years, has been 100,000 volumes. 
 Of Murray's Encyclopedia of Geography, morg than 50,000 volumes 
 have been sold, and of McCuUoch's Commercial Dictionary, 10,000 
 volumes. Of Alexander Smith's Poems, the sale, in a few months, 
 has reached 10,000 copies. The sale of Mr. Thackeray's works has 
 been quadruple that of England, and that of the works of Mr. Dick- 
 ens counts almost by millions of volumes. Of Bleak House,' in all 
 its various forms — in newspapers, magazines, and volumes — it has 
 already amounted to several hundred thousands of copies. Of Bul- 
 wer's last novel, since it was completed, the sale has, I am told, 
 exceeded 35,000. Of Thiers's French Kevolution and Consulate, 
 there have been sold 32,000, and of Montagu's edition of Lord Ba- 
 con's works 4,000 copies. 
 
 If the sales of books were as great in England as they are here, 
 English authors would be abundantly paid. In reply it will be said 
 their works are cheap here because we pay no copy-right. For the pay- 
 ment of the authors, however, a very small sum would be required, 
 if the whole people of England could afford, as they should be able 
 to do, to purchase books. A contribution of a shilling per head 
 
42 
 
 would give, as has been shown, a sum of almost eight millions of 
 dollars, sufficient to pay to fifteen hundred salaries nearly equal to 
 those of our secretaries of State. Centralization, however, destroys 
 the market for books, and the sale is, therefore, small; and the few 
 successful writers owe their fortunes to the collection of 4arge contri- 
 butions made among a small number of readers ; while the mass of 
 authors live on, as did poor Tom Hood, from day to day, with 
 scarcely a hope of improvement in their condition. 
 
 Sixty years since. Great Britain was a wealthy country, abounding 
 in libraries and universities, and giving to the world some of the 
 best, and best paid, writers of the age. At that time the people 
 of this country were but four millions, and they were poor, and un- 
 provided either with books or libraries. Since then they have grown 
 to twenty-six millions, millions of whom have been emigrants, in 
 general arriving here with nothing but the clothing on their backs. 
 These poor men have had everything to create for themselves — farms, 
 roads, houses, libraries, schools, and college^ — and yet, poor as they 
 have been, they furnish now a demand for the principal products of 
 English mind greater than is found at home. If we can make such 
 a market, why cannot they ? If they had such a market, would it 
 not pay their authors to the full extent of their merits ? Unquestion- 
 ably it would ; and if they see fit to pursue a system tending to 
 cheapen the services of the laborer in the field, in the workshop, and 
 at the desk, there is no more reason for calling upon the people 
 of this country to make up their deficiencieSj towards those who con- 
 tribute to their pleasure or instruction by writing books, than there 
 would be in asking us to aid in supporting the hundreds of thousands 
 of day laborers, their wives and children, whom the same system 
 condemns, unpitied, to the workhouse. 
 
 But, it will be asked, is it right that we should read the works of 
 Macaulay, Dickens, and others, without compensation to the authors ? 
 In' answer, it may be said, that we give them precisely what their own 
 countrymen have given to their Dalton, Davy, WoUaston, Franklin, 
 Parry, and the thousands of others who have furnished the bodies of 
 which books are composed — and more than we ourselves give to the 
 men among us engaged in qjiltivating science — fame. This, it will be 
 said, is an unsubstantial return ; yet Byron deemed it quite sufficient 
 when he first saw an American edition of his works, coming, as it 
 seemed to him, " from posterity." Miss Bremer found no small re- 
 ward for her labors in knowing the high r^egard in which she was 
 held ; and it was no small payment when, even in the wilds of the 
 
43 
 
 west, she met with numerous persons who would gladly have her 
 travel free of charge, because of the delight she had afforded them. 
 Miss Carlen tells her readers that " of one triumph" she was proud. 
 "It was," she says, "when I held in my hand, for the first time, one 
 of my works, translated and published in America. My eyes filled 
 with tears. The bright dreams of youth again passed before me. 
 Ye Americans had planted the seed, and ye also approved of the 
 fruit !" This is the feeling of a writer that xjultivates literature with 
 some other object in view than mere profit. It differs entirely from 
 that of English authors, because in England, more than in any other 
 country, book-making is a trade, carried on exclusively with a view 
 to profit; and hence it is that the character of English books so much 
 declines. 
 
 But is it really true that foreign authors derive no pecuniary ad- 
 vantage from the republication of their books in this country ? It is 
 not. Mr. Macaulay has admitted that much of his reputation, and of 
 the sale of his books at home, has been a consequence of his reputa- 
 tion here, where his Essays were first reprinted. At the moment of 
 writing this, I have met with a notice of his speeches, first collected 
 here, from which the following is an extract ; — 
 
 "We owe much to America. Not content with .charming us with the works 
 of her native genius, she teaches us also to appreciate our own. She steps in 
 between the timidity of a British author, and the fastidiousness of the British 
 public, and by using her ' good offices' brings both parties to a friendly un- 
 derstanding." — Morning Chronicle. 
 
 If the people of England are largely indebted to America for 
 being made acquainted with the merits of their authors, are not the 
 authors also indebted to America for much of their pecuniary reward ? 
 Undoubtedly they are. Mr. Macaulay owes much of his fortune to 
 American publishers, readers, and critics, and such is the case to 
 perhaps a greater extent with Mr. Carlyle, whose papers were first 
 collected here, a,nd their merits thus made known to his countrymen. 
 Lamb's papers of Elia were first collected here. It is to the diligence 
 of an American publisher that De Quincey owes the publication of 
 a complete edition of his works, now to be followed by a similar one 
 in England. The papers of Professor Wilson owe their separate re- 
 publication to American booksellers. The value of Mr. Thackeray's 
 copy-rights has been greatly increased by his reception here. So has 
 it been with Mr. Dickens. All of those persons profit largely by 
 their fame abroad, while the men who contribute to the extension of 
 
44 
 
 knowledge by the publication of facts and ideas never reap profit 
 from their publication abroad, and are rarely permitted to acquire even 
 fame. Godfrey died poor. The merchants of England gave no for- 
 tune to his children, and Hadley stole his fame. The people of that 
 country, who travel in steam-vessels, have given to the family of 
 Fulton no pecuniary reward, while her writers have uniformly en- 
 deavored to deprive him of the reputation which constituted almost 
 the sole inheritance of his family. The whde people of Europe are 
 profiting by the discovery of chloroform ; but who inquires what has 
 become of the family of its unfortunate discoverer ? Nobody ! The 
 people of England profit largely by the discoveries of Fourcroy, 
 Berzelius, and many other of the continental philosophers ; but do 
 those who manufacture cheap cloth, or those who wear it, contribute 
 to the support of the families of those philosophers ? Did they con- 
 tribute to their support while alive ? Certainly not. To do so would 
 have been in opposition to the idea that the real contributors to know- 
 ledge should be " hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the gen- 
 tlemen who dress up their facts and ideas in an attractive form and 
 place them before the world in the form of cloth or books. 
 
 We are largely indebted to the labors of literary men, and they 
 should be well paid, but their claims to pecuniary reward have been 
 much exaggerated, because they have held the pen and have had 
 always a high degree of belief in their own deserts. Their right in the 
 books they publish is precisely similar to, and no greater than, that of 
 the man who culls the flowers and arranges the bouquets; and, when 
 that is provided for, their books are entitled to become common pro- 
 perty. English authors are already secured in a monopoly for forty- 
 two years among a body of people so large that a contribution of a 
 shilling a head would enable each and all of' them to live in luxury j 
 and if British policy prevents their countrymen from paying them, it is 
 to the British parliament they should look for redress, and not to our 
 Executive. When they shall awaken to the.fact that "cheap labor" 
 with the spade, the plough, and the loom, brings with it necessarily 
 " cheap labor" with the pen, they will become opponents, and cease 
 to be advocates of the system under which they suffer. All that, in 
 the mean time, we can say to them is, that we protect our own authors 
 by giving them a monopoly of our own immense and rapidly growing 
 market, and that if they choose to come and live among us we will 
 grant them the same protection. — We may now look to the condition 
 of our own literary men. 
 
45 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 Our system is based upon an idea directly the reverse of the one 
 on which rests the English system — that of decentralization ; and we 
 may now study its effects as shown in the development of literary 
 tendencies and in the reward of authors. 
 
 Centralization tends towards tasing the people for building up 
 great institutions at a distance from those who pay the taxes ; de- 
 centralization towards leaving it to the people to tax themselves for 
 the support of common and high schools in their own neighborhood. 
 The first tends towards placing the man who has instruction to sell 
 at a distance from those who need to buy it; while the other tends 
 towards bringing the teacher to the immediate vicinity of the scho- 
 lars, and thus diminishing the coat of education. The effects of the 
 latter are seen in the fact that the new States, no less than the old 
 ones, are engaged in the effort to enable all, without distinction of sex 
 or fortune, to obtain the instruction needful for enabling them to 
 become consumers of books, and customers to the men who produce 
 them. Massachusetts exhibits to the world 182,000 scholars in her 
 public schools ; New York, 778,000 in the public ones, and 75,000 
 in the private ones ; and Iowa and Wisconsin are laying the founda- 
 tion of a system that will enable them, a* a future day, to do as 
 much. Boston taxes herself $365,000 for purposes of education, 
 while Philadelphia expends more than half a million for the same 
 purposes, and exhibits 50,000 children in her public schools. Here 
 we have, at once, a great demand for instructors, offering a premium 
 on intellectual effort, and its effect is seen in the numerous associa- 
 tions of teachers, each anxious to confer with the others in regard to 
 improvement in the modes of education. School libraries are needed 
 for the children, and already those of New York exhibit about a mil- 
 lion and a half of volumes. Books of a higher class are required for 
 the teachers, and here is created another demand leading to the 
 preparation of new and improved books by the teachers themselves. 
 The scholars enter life, and next we find numerous apprentices' 
 libraries and mercantile libraries, producing farther demand for books, 
 and aiding in providing reward for those to whom the world is in- 
 debted for them. Everybody must learn to read and write, and 
 everybody must therefore have books; and to this universality of 
 demand it is due that the sale of those required for early education 
 
46 
 
 13 SO immense. Of the works of Peter Parley it counts by millions; 
 but if we take his three historical books (price 75 cents each) alone, 
 we find that it amounts to between half a million and a million of 
 volumes. Of Goodrich's United States it has been a quarter of a 
 million. Of Morse's Geography and Atlas (50 cents) the sale is said 
 to be no less than 70,000 per annum. Of Abbot's histories the sale 
 is said to have already been more than 400,000, while of Emerson's 
 Arithmetic and Eeader it counts almost by millions. Of Mitchell's 
 several geographies it is 400,000 a year. 
 
 In other branches of education the same state of things is seen to 
 exist. Of the Boston Academy's collection of sacred music, the sale 
 has exceeded 600,000, and the aggregate sale of five books by the 
 same author has probably exceeded a million, and the price of these 
 is a dollar per volume. 
 
 Leaving the common schools, we come to the high schools and 
 colleges, of which latter the names of no less than 120 are given in 
 the American Almanac. Here again we have decentralization, and 
 its efiect is to bring within reach of almost the whole people a higher 
 degree of education than could be afforded by the common schools. The 
 problem to be solved is, as stated by a recent and most enlightened 
 traveller, " How are citizens to be made thinking beings in the greatest 
 numbers?" The solution is found in making of the educational 
 fabric a great pyramid, of which the commoti schools form the base 
 and the Smithsonian Institute the apex, the intermediate places 
 being filled with high schools, lyceums, and colleges of various 
 descriptions, fitted to the powers and the means of those who desire 
 instruction. All these make, of course, demand for books, and hence 
 it is that the sale of Anthon's series of classics (averaging $1) 
 amounts, as I am told, to certainly not less than 50,000 volumes 
 per annum, while of the Classical Dictionary of the same author ($4) 
 not less than 30,000 have been sold. Of Liddell and Scott's Greek 
 Lexicon (S5), edited by Prof. Drisler, th§ sale has been not less 
 than 25,000, and probably much larger. Of Webster's 4to. Dic- 
 tionary (16) it has been, I am assured, 60,000, and perhaps even 
 80,000; and of the royal 8vo. one (13 50), 250,000. Of Bolmar's 
 French school books not less than 150,000 volumes have been 
 sold. The number of books used in the higher schools — text- 
 books in philosophy, chemistry, and other branches of science — is 
 exceedingly great, and it would be easy to produce numbers of which 
 the sale is from five to ten thousand per annum; but to do so would 
 occupy too much space, and I must content myself with the few 
 facts already given in regard to this department of literature. 
 
47 
 
 Decentralization, or local self-government, tends thus to place the 
 whole people in a condition to read newspapers^ while the same cause 
 tends to produce those local interests which give interest to the news- 
 papers; and induce men to purchase them. Hence it is that their 
 number is so large. The census of 1850 gives it at 2,625 ; and the 
 increase since that time has been very great. The total number of 
 papers printed can scarcely be under 600,000,000, which would give 
 almost 24 for every person, old and youngs black and white, male 
 and female, in the Union. But recently the newspaper press of the 
 United Kingdom was said to require about 160,000 reams of paper, 
 which would give about 75,000,000 of papers, or two and a-half per 
 head. 
 
 The number of daily papers was returned at 350, but it has greatly 
 increased, and must now exceed four hundred- Chicago, which then 
 was a small town, rejoices now in no less than 24 periodicals, seven 
 of which are daily, and five of them of the largest size. At St. Louis, 
 which but a few years since was on the extreme borders of civilization, 
 we find several, and one of these has grown from a little sheet of 8 by 
 12 inches to the largest size, yielding to its proprietors $50,000 per 
 annum, while Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham are still com- 
 pelled to depend upon their tri-weekly sheets. St. Louis itself fur- 
 nishes the type, and Louisville furnishes the paper. Everywhere, the 
 increase in size is greater than that in the number of newspapers, and 
 the increase of ability in both the city and country press, greater than 
 in either number or size. These things are necessary consequences 
 of that decentralization which builds school-houses and provides 
 teachers, where centralization raises armies and provides generals. 
 The schools enable young men to read, think, and write, and the local 
 newspaper is always at hand in which to publish. Beginning thus 
 with the daily or weekly journal, the youth of talent makes his way 
 gradually to the monthly or quarterly magazine, and ultimately to 
 the independent book. 
 
 Examine where we may through the newspaper press, there is seen 
 the activity which always accompanies the knowledge that men can 
 rise in the world if they will; but this is palrticularly obvious in the 
 daily press of the cities, whose efforts to obtain information, and 
 whose exertions to lay it before the public, are without a parallel. 
 Centralization, like that of the London Times, furnishes its readers 
 with brief paragraphs of telegraphic news, where decentralization 
 gives columns. The New York Trilmne furnishes, for two cents, 
 
48 
 
 better papers than are given in London for ten, and it scatters them 
 over the country by hundreds of thousands. Decentralization is edu- 
 cating the whole mind of the country, and it is to this it is due that 
 the American farmer is furnished with machines which are, accord- 
 ing to the London Times, " about twice as light in draught as the 
 lightest of English machines of the same description, doing as much, 
 if not more work than the best of them, and with much less power ; 
 dressing the grain, which they do not, and which can be profitably 
 disposed of at one-half, or at least one-third less money than its 
 British rival's" — and is thus enabled to purchase books. Centrali- 
 zation, on the other band, furnishes the English farmer, according 
 to the same authority, "with machines strong and dear enough to 
 rob him of all future improvements, and tremendously heavy, either 
 to work or to draw ;" and thus deprives him of all power to educate 
 his children, or to purchase for himself either books or newspapers. 
 
 Religious decentralization exerts also a powerful influence on the 
 arrangements for imparting the instruction which provides purchasers 
 for books. The Methodist Society, with its gigantic operations ; the 
 Presbyterian Board of Publication; the Baptist Association; the 
 Sunday School, and other societies, are all incessantly at work creating 
 readers. The effect of all these efforts for the dissemination of cheap 
 knowledge is shown in the first instance in the number of semi- 
 monthly, monthly, and quarterly journals, representing every shade 
 of politics and religion, and every department of literature and 
 science. 
 
 The number of these returned to the census was 175 ; but that 
 must, I think, have been even then much below the truth. Since 
 then it has been much increased. Of two of them, Putnam's and 
 Harper's, the first exclusively original, and the latter about two-thirds 
 so, the sale is about two millions of numbers per annum; while of 
 three others, published in Philadelphia, it is about a million. Cheap as 
 are these journals, at twenty-five cents each, the sum total of the 
 price paid for them by the consumers is about $700,000. The quan- 
 tity of paper required for a single one of them is about 16,000 reams 
 of double medium, being but one-tenth as much as has recently 
 been given as the consumption of the whole newspaper press of Great 
 Britain and Ireland. Every pursuit in life, and almost every shade 
 of opinion, has its periodical. A single city in western New York 
 furnishes no less than four agricultural and horticultural journals, one 
 of them published weekly, with a circulation of 15,000, and the others, 
 monthly, with a joint circulation of 25,000. The Merchants' Maga- 
 
49 
 
 zine, which set the example for the one now published in London, 
 has a circulation of 3,500. The Banker^ Magazine also set the 
 example recently followed in England. Medicine and Law have their 
 numerous and well supported journals; and Dental Surgery alone has 
 five, one of which has a circulation of 6,000 copies, while all Europe 
 has but two, and those of very inferior character,* North, south, 
 east, and west, the periodical press is collecting the opinions of all 
 our people, while centralization is gradually limiting the expression 
 of opinion, in England, to those who live in and near London. 
 
 Upon this extensive base of cheap domestic literature rests that 
 portion of the fabric composed of reproduction of foreign books, the 
 quantities of some of which were given in my last. The proportion 
 which these bear to American books has been thus given for the six 
 months ending on the 30th of June last : — 
 
 Republications ....... 169 
 
 Original .....*.. 522 
 
 691 
 Of these last, 17 were original translations. 
 
 We see, thus, that the proportion of domestic to foreign products 
 is already more than three to one. How the sale of the latter com- 
 pares with that of the former, will be seen by the following facts in 
 relation to books of almost all sizes, prices, arid kinds; some of which 
 have been furnished by the publishers themselves, whilst others are 
 derived from gentlemen connected with the trade, whose means of 
 information are such as warrant entire reliance upon their statements. 
 
 Of air American authors, those of school-books excepted, there is 
 no one of whose books so many have been circulated as those of Mr. 
 Irving. Prior to the publication of the edition recently issued by Mr. 
 Putnam, the sale had amounted to some hundreds of thousands ; and 
 yet of that edition, selling at $1 25 pej volume, it has already 
 amounted to 144,000 vols. Of Uncle Tom, the sale has amounted 
 to 295,000 copies, partly in one, and partly in two volumes, and the 
 total number of volumes amounts probably to about 450,000. 
 
 Priceper vol. Volumes. 
 Of the two works of Miss "Warner, Queeehy, 
 
 and the Wide, Wide World, the price and 
 
 sale have been ^ 88 104,000 
 
 • It is a remarkable fact that there should be in this country no less than four 
 Colleges of Dental Surgery, while all Europe presents not even a single one. 
 4 
 
50 
 
 Price per vol. 
 
 Fern Leayes, by Fanny Fern, in six months . 
 Reveries of a Bachelor, and other books, by Ike 
 
 Marvel 
 
 Alderbrook, by Fanny Forester, 3 vols. 
 Northup's Twelve Years a Slave . 
 Novels of Mrs. Hentz, in three years 
 Major Jones's Courtship, and Travels 
 Salad for the Solitary, by a new author, in five 
 
 months ...... 
 
 Headley's Napoleon and his Marshals, Wash 
 
 ington and his Generals, and other works . 
 Stephens's Travels in Egypt and Grreeee . 
 
 " " Yucatan and Central America 
 
 Kendall's Expedition to Santa Fe . 
 Lynch's Expedition to the Dead Sea, 8vo. 
 " " 12mo. 
 
 Western Scenes 
 
 Young's Science of Government 
 ' Seward's Life of John Quincy Adams 
 Frost's Pictorial History of the World, 3 vols 
 Sparks's American Biography, 25 vols. . 
 Encyclopaedia Americana, 14 vols. . 
 Griswold's Poets and Prose Writers of America, 
 
 3 vols 
 
 Barnes's Notes on the Gospels, Epistles, &c., 11 
 
 vols. ...... 
 
 Aiken's Christian Minstrel, in two years 
 Alexander on the Psalms, 3 vols. . 
 Buist's Flower Garden Directory . 
 Cole on Fruit Trees .... 
 
 " Diseases of Domestic Animals . 
 Downing's Fruits and Fruit Trees . 
 " Rural Essays 
 " Landscape Gardening . 
 " Cottage Residences . " . 
 " Country Homes . 
 Mahan's Civil Engineering 
 Leslie's Cookery and Receipt-books 
 Guyot's Lectures on Earth and Man 
 Wood and Bache's Medical Dispensatory 
 
 1 25 
 
 1 25 
 50 
 
 1 00 
 63 
 50 
 
 1 25 
 
 25 
 87 
 50 
 25 
 00 
 25 
 50 
 00 
 00 
 50 
 75 
 00 
 
 3 00 
 
 Yolumes, 
 
 45,000 
 
 70,000 
 33,000 
 20,000 
 93,000 
 31,000 
 
 5,000 
 
 200,000 
 
 80,000 
 
 60,000 
 
 40,000 
 
 15,000 
 
 8,000 
 
 14,000 
 
 12,000' 
 
 30,000 
 
 60,000 
 
 100,000 
 
 280,000 
 
 21,000 
 
 75 
 
 300,000 
 
 62 
 
 40,000 
 
 1 17 
 
 10,000 
 
 1 25 
 
 10,000 
 
 50 
 
 18,000 
 
 50 
 
 34,000 
 
 1 50 
 
 15,000 
 
 3 50 
 
 3,000 
 
 3 50 
 
 9,000 
 
 2 00 
 
 6,250 
 
 4 00 
 
 3,500 
 
 3 00 
 
 7,500 
 
 1 00 
 
 96,000 
 
 1 00 
 
 6,000 
 
 5 00 
 
 60,000 
 
51 
 
 Prieeper vol. Volumes. 
 Dunglison's Medical writings, in all 10 vols.' . 2 50 50,000 
 PancDa?t's Surgery, 4to. . . , . . 10 00 4,000 
 
 Rayer, Eicord, and Moreau's Surgical "Works 
 
 (translations) 15 00 5,600 
 
 Webster's Works, 6 vols 2 00 46,800 
 
 Kent's Commentaries, 4 vols. . . . 3 38 84,000 
 
 Next to Chancellor Kent's work comes Greenleaf on Evidence, 3 
 vols., $16 50; the sale of which has been exceedingly great, but 
 what has been its extent, I cannot say. 
 
 Of Blatchford's General Statutes of New York, a local work, price 
 14 50, the sale has been 3,000 ; equal to alpiost 30,000 of a similar 
 work for the United Kingdom, 
 
 How great is the sale of Judge Story's books can be judged only 
 from the fact that the copy-right now yield's, and for years past has 
 yielded, more than $8,000 per annum. Of the sale of Mr. Presoott's 
 works little i? certainly known, but it cannot, I understand, have been 
 less than 160,000 volumes. That of Mr. 'Bancroft's History has al- 
 ready risen, certainly to 30,000 copies, and- 1 am told it is consider- 
 ably more ; and yet even that is a sale, for such a work, entirely 
 unprecedented. 
 
 Of the works of Hawthorn, Longfellow, Bryant, Willis, Curtis, 
 Sedgwick, Sigourney, and numerous others, the sale is exceedingly 
 great; but, as not even an approximation to the true amount can 
 be offered, I must leave it to you to judge of it by comparison with 
 those of les.s popular authors above enumerated. In several of these 
 cases, beautifully illustrated editions have been published, of which 
 large numbers have been sold. Of Mr. Longfellow's volume there 
 have been no less than ten editions. These, various facts will proba- 
 bly suffice to satisfy you that this country presents a market for 
 books of almost every description, unparalleled in the world. 
 
 In reflecting upon this subject, it is necessary to bear in mind that 
 the monopoly, granted to authors and their families, is for the term of 
 no less than forty-two years, and that in that period the number of 
 persons subjected to it is likely to grow to 3ittle short of a hundred 
 millions, with a power of consumption that will probably be ten times 
 greater than now exists. If the Commentaries of Chancellor Kent 
 continue to maintain their present position, as they probably will, 
 may we not reasonably suppose that the demand for them will con- 
 tinue as great, or nearly so, as it is at present, and that the total sale 
 during the period of copy-right will reach a. quarter of a million of 
 
52 
 
 volumes ? So, too, of the histories of Bancroft and Prescott, and of 
 other books of permanent character. 
 
 Such being the extent of the market for the products of literary 
 labor, we may now inquire into its rewards. 
 
 Beginning with the common schools, we find a vast number of 
 young men and young women acting as teachers of others, while 
 qualifying themselves, for occupying other places in life. Many of 
 them rise gradually to become teachers in high schools and professors 
 in colleges, while all of them have at hand the newspaper, ready to 
 enable them, if gifted with the power of expressing themselves on 
 paper, to come before the world. The numerous newspapers require 
 editors and contributors, and the amount appropriated to the pay- 
 ment of this class of the community is a very large one. Next come 
 the magazines, many of which pay very libera;lly. I have now before 
 me a statement from a single publisher, in whibh he says that to Messrs. 
 Willis, Longfellow, Bryant, and Alston, his price was uniformly |50 
 for a poetical article, long or short — and his readers know that they 
 were generally very short j in one case only fourteen lines. To 
 numerous others it was from $25 to $40. In one case he has paid 
 $25 per page for prose. To Mr. Cooper he paid $1,800 for a novel, 
 and $1,000 for a series of naval biographies, the author retaining the 
 copy-right for separate publication ; and in such cases, if the work 
 be good, its appearance in the magazine acts as the best of advertise- 
 ments. To Mr. James he paid $1,200 for a novel, leaving him also 
 the copy-right. For a single number of his journal he has paid to 
 authors $1,500. The total amount paid for? original matter by two 
 magazines — the selling price of which is $3 per annum — in ten 
 years, has exceeded $130,000, giving an average of $13,000 per 
 annum. The Messrs. Harper inform me that the expenditure for 
 literary and artistic labor required for their magazine is $2,000 per 
 month, or $24,000 a year. 
 
 Passing upwards, we reach the producers of books, and here we find 
 rewards not, I believe, to be paralleled elsewhere. Mr. Irving 
 stands, I imagine, at the head of living authors for the amount re- 
 ceived for his books. The sums paid to the renbwned Peter Parley 
 must have been enormously great, but what" has been their extent I 
 have no means of ascertaining. Mr. Mitchell, the geographer, has 
 realized a handsome fortune from his school-books. Professor Davies 
 is understood to have received more than $50,000 from the series pub- 
 lished by him. The Abbotts, Emerson, and numerous other authors 
 engaged in the preparation of books for young persons and schools, 
 
53 
 
 are largely paid. Professor Anthon, we are informed, has received 
 more than $60,000 for his series of classics. The French series of 
 Mr. Bolmar has yielded him upwards of $20,000. The school geo- 
 graphy of Mr. Morse is stated to have yielded more than $20,000 to 
 the author. A single medical bot)k, of one 8vo. volume, is under- 
 stood to have produced its authors $60,000, and a series of medical 
 books has given to its author probably $30,000. Mr. Downing's re- 
 ceipts from his books have been very large. The two works of Miss 
 Warner must have already yielded her from $12,000 to $15,000, and 
 perhaps much more. Mr. Headley is stated to have received about 
 $40,000 ; and the few books of Ike Marvel have yielded him about 
 $20,000 ; a single one, The Reveries of a Bachelor, produced more 
 than $4,000 in the first six months. Mrs. Stowe has been very 
 largely paid. Miss Leslie's Cookery and Receipt books have paid 
 her $12,000. Dr. Barnes is stated to have received more than 
 $30,000 for the copy-right of his religious works. Fanny Fern has 
 probably received not less than $6,000 for the 12mo. volume pub- 
 lished but six months since. Mr. Prescott was stated, several years 
 since, to have then received $90,000 froni his books, and I have 
 never seen it contradicted. According to the rate of compensation 
 generally understood to be received by Mr. Bancroft, the present sale 
 of each volume of his yields him more than $15,000, and he has the 
 long period of forty-two years for future sale. Judge Story died, 
 as has been stated, in the receipt of more than $8,000 per annum; 
 and the amount has not, as it is understood,, diminished. Mr. Web- 
 ster's works, in three years, can scarcely have paid less than $25,000. 
 Kent's Commentaries are understood to have yielded to their author 
 and his heirs more than $120,000, and if we add to this for the 
 remainder of the period only one-half of this sum, we shall obtain 
 $180,000, or $45,000 as the compensation for a single Svo. volume, 
 a reward for literary labor unexampled in history. What has been 
 the amount received by Professor Greenleaf I cannot learn, but his 
 work stands second only, in the legal line, to that of Chancellor 
 Kent. The price paid for Webster's Svo. Dictionary is understood 
 to be fifty cents per copy; and if so, with a sale of 250,000, it must 
 already have reached $125,000. If now td this we add the quarto, 
 at only a dollar a copy, we shall have a sum approaching to, and 
 perhaps exceeding, $180,000 ; more, probably, than has been paid 
 for all the dictionaries of Europe in the same' period of time. What 
 have been the prices paid to Messrs. Hawthorn, Longfellow, Bryant, 
 Willis, Curtis, and numerous others, I cannot say; but it is well known 
 
54 
 
 that they have been very large. It is not, however, only the few who 
 are liberally paid ; all are so who manifest any ability, and here it is 
 that we find the effect of the decentralizing system of this country as 
 compared with the centralizing one of Great Britain. There Mr. 
 Macaulay is largely paid for his Essays, while men of almost equal 
 ability can scarcely obtain the means of support. Dickens is a lite- 
 rary Croesus, and Tom Hood dies leaving his family in hopeless 
 poverty. Such is not here the case. Any manifestation of ability 
 is sure to produce claimants for the publication of books. No sooner 
 had the story of " Hot Corn" appeared in The Tribune, than a dozen 
 booksellers were applicants to the author for a book. The. competi- 
 tion is here for the purchase of the privilege of .printing, and this 
 competition is not confined to the publishers of a single city, as is the 
 case in Britain. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and even Auburn 
 and Cincinnati, present numerous publishers, all anxious to secure the 
 works of writers of ability, in any department of literature ; and 
 were it possible to present a complete list of our well-paid author's, 
 its extent could not fail to surprise you greatly, as the very few facts 
 that have come to my knowledge in reference to some of the lesser 
 stars of the literary world have done by me. You will observe that I 
 have confined myself to the question of demand for books and com- 
 pensation to their authors, without reference to that of the ability 
 displayed In their preparation. That we may have good books, all 
 that is required is that we make a large market for them, which is 
 done here to an extent elsewhere unknown. 
 
 Forty years since, the question was asked by the Edinburgh Re- 
 view, Who reads an American book ? Judging from the facts here 
 given, may we not reasonably suppose that the time is fast approach- 
 ing, when the question will be asked, Who does not read American 
 books ? 
 
 Forty years since, had we asked where wera the Aomesq/" American 
 authors, we should generally have been referred to very humble 
 houses in our cities. Those who now inquire for them will find their 
 answer in the beautiful volume lately published by Messrs. Putnam and 
 Co., the precursor of others destined to show the literary men of this 
 country enjoying residences as agreeable as any that have been occu- 
 pied by such men in any part of the world ; and in almost every case, 
 those homes have been due to the profits of the pen. Less than half a 
 century since, the race of literary men was scarcely known in the coun- 
 try, and yet the amount now paid for literary labor is greater than in 
 Great Britain and France combined, and will probably be, in twenty 
 
55 
 
 years more, greater than in all the world besiSe. With the increase of 
 number, there has been a corresponding increase in the consideration 
 in which they are held; and the respect with which even unknown 
 authors are treated, when compared with the^ disrespect manifested in 
 England towards such men, will be obvious to all familiar with the 
 management of the journals of that country who read the following 
 in one of our principal periodicals : — 
 
 " The editor of Putnam's Monthly will give to every article forwarded for 
 insertiou in the Magazine a careful examination, and, when requested to do 
 BO, will return the MS. if not accepted." 
 
 Here, the competition is among the publishers to buy the products of 
 literary labor, whereas, abroad, the competition is to sell them, and 
 therefore is the treatment of our authors, even when unknown, so 
 different. Long may it continue to be so ! 
 
 Such having been the result of half a century, during which we 
 have had to lay the foundation of the system that has furnished so 
 vast a body of readers, what may not bo expected in the next half 
 century, during which the population will increase to a hundred mil- 
 lions, with a power to consume the products of literary labor growing 
 many times faster than the growth of numbers ? If this country is 
 properly termed " the paradise of women," may it not be as correctly 
 denominated the paradise of authors, and should they not be content 
 to dwell in it as their predecessors have done ? Is it wise in them to 
 seek a change ? Their best friends would, I think, unite with me in 
 advising that it is not. Should they succeed in obtaining what they 
 now desire, the day will, as I think, come, when they will be satisfied 
 that their real friends had been those who opposed the confirmation 
 of the treaty now before the Senate. 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 We have commenced the erection of a great literary and scientific 
 edifice. The foundation is already broad, deep, and well laid, but it 
 is seen to increase in breadth, depth, and strength, with every step 
 of increase in height ; and the work itself is seen to assume, from 
 year to year^ more and more the natural form of a true pyramid. 
 To the height that such a building may be carried, no living man 
 will venture to affix a limit. What is thie tendency to durability 
 in a work thus constructed, the pyramids of Egypt, and the mountains 
 
of the Andes, and of the Himalaya, may attest. That edifice is the 
 product of decentralization. 
 
 Elsewhere, centralization is, as has been shown, producing the 
 opposite effect, narrowing the base, and diminishing the elevation. 
 Having prospered under decentralization, our authors seek to intro- 
 duce centralization. Failing to accomplish their object by the ordi- 
 nary course of legislation, they have had recourse to the executive 
 power ; and thus the end to be accomplished, and the means used 
 for its accomplishment, are in strict accordance with each other. 
 
 We are invited to grant to the authors and booksellers of England, 
 and their agent or agents here, entire control over a highly important 
 source from which our people have been accustomed to derive their 
 supplies of literary food. Before granting to' these persons any power 
 here, it might be well to inquire how they have used their power at 
 home. Doing this, we find that, as is usually the case with those 
 enjoying a monopoly, they have almost uniformly preferred to derive 
 their profits from high prices and small sales, and have thus, in a great 
 degree, deprived their countrymen of the power to purchase books ; 
 a consequence of which has been that the reading community has, 
 very generally, been driven to dependence upon circulating libra- 
 ries, to the injury of both the authors and the public. The extent 
 to which this system of high prices in regard to sehool-books has 
 been carried, and the danger of intrusting such men with power, 
 are well shown in the fact that the same government which has so 
 recently concluded a copy-right treaty with our own, has since entered 
 "into the bookselling trade on its own account,'' competing "with the 
 private dealer, who has to bear copy-right charges." The subjects of 
 this " reactionary step" on the part of a government that so much 
 professes to love free trade, are, as we are told, " the famous school- 
 books of the Irish national system."* A new office has been created, 
 " paid for with a public salary," for "the issue of books to the retail 
 dealers;" and the centralization of power over this important portion 
 of the trade is, we are told,f defended in the columns of the Times, 
 as "tending to bring down the price of Jchool-books ; for book- 
 sellers who possess copy-rights, now sell their books at exorbitant 
 prices, and, by underselling them, the commissioners will be able to 
 beat them." Judging from this, it would seem almost necessary, if 
 this treaty is to be ratified, that there should be added some provision 
 authorizing our government to appoint commissioners for the regula- 
 
 * Spectator, June 4, 1853. f Ibid. 
 
57 
 
 tion of trade, and for " underselling" those persons who " now sell 
 their books at exorbitant prices." If it be ratified, we shall be only 
 entering on the path of centralization ; and it may not be amiss that, 
 before ratification, we should endeavor to determine to what point it 
 will probably carry us in the end. 
 
 The question is often askedy What difference can it make to the 
 people of this country whether they do, or do not, pay to the Eng- 
 lish author a few cents in return for the pleasure afforded by the 
 perusal of his book ? Not very much, certainly, to the wealthy reader; 
 but as every extra cent is important to the poorer one, and tends to 
 limit his power to purchase, it may be well to calculate how many 
 cents would probably be required ; and, that we may do so, I give you 
 here a list* of the comparative prices of English and American 
 editions of a few of the books that have been published within the 
 last few years : — 
 
 Braude's Encyclopaedia 
 Ure's Dictionary of Manufactures 
 Alison's Europe, cheapest edition 
 
 D'AubignA's Reformation . . . . 11 50, 1 00 
 Bulwer's " My Novel" 
 Lord Mahon's England 
 Macaulay'a England, per vol. 
 Campbell's Chief Justices . 
 " Lord Chancellors 
 Queens of England, 8 vols. 
 Queens of Scotland 
 Hallam's Middle Ages 
 Arnold's Rome . 
 Life of John Foster . 
 Layard's Nineveh, complete edition 
 Mrs. Somerville's Physical Sciences 
 Whewell's Elements of Morality 
 Napier's Peninsular War . 
 Thirlwall's Greece, cheapest edition 
 Dick's Practical Astronomer 
 Jane Eyre .... 
 
 The difference, as we see., between the selling price in London and 
 in New York, of the first book in this list, is' no less than eleven dol- 
 lars, or almost three times as much as the whole price of the Ame- 
 rican edition. To what is this extraordinary diifcrence to be attri- 
 buted ? To any excess in the cost of paper or printing in London ? 
 
 $15 00 
 
 $4 00 
 
 15 00 
 
 5 00 
 
 25 00 
 
 5 00 
 
 1 75 
 
 2 25 
 
 10 50 
 
 75 
 
 13 00 
 
 4 00 
 
 4 50 
 
 40 
 
 7 50 
 
 3 50 
 
 25 50 
 
 12 00 
 
 24 00 
 
 10 00 
 
 15 00 
 
 6 00 
 
 7 50 
 
 1 75 
 
 12 00 
 
 3 00 
 
 6 00 
 
 1 25 
 
 9 00 
 
 1 75 
 
 2 50 
 
 50 
 
 7 50 
 
 1 00 
 
 12 00 
 
 3 25 
 
 7 00 
 
 3 00 
 
 2 50 
 
 50 
 
 7 50 
 
 25 
 
 * Copied from an article in the New Yliirk Daily Times. 
 
58 
 
 Certainly not ; for paper and printers' labor are both cheaper there 
 than ^ere. Is it, then, to the necessity for compensating the author ? 
 Certainly not ; for there are in this country fifty persons as fully 
 competent as Mr. Brande for the preparation of such a work, who 
 would willingly do it for a dollar a copy, calculating upon being paid 
 out of a large sale. As the sale of books in England is not large, it 
 might be necessary to allow him two dollars each; but even this 
 would still leave nine dollars to be accounted for. Where does all 
 this go ? Part of it to the Chancellor of the. Exchequer, part to the 
 Times, and other newspapers and journals that charge monopoly 
 prices for the privilege of advertising, and the balance to the book- 
 sellers who " possess copy-rights," and " sell their books at such 
 exorbitant prices" that they have driven the government to turn 
 bookseller, with a view to bring down prices; and these are the very 
 men to whom it is now proposed to grant unlimited control over the 
 sale of all books produced abroad. 
 
 It will, perhaps, be said that the treaty contains a proviso that the 
 author shall sell his copy-right to an American publisher, or shall 
 himself cause his book to bs republished here. Such a proviso may 
 be there, but whether it is so, or not, no one knows, for everything 
 connected with this effort to extend the executive power is kept as 
 profoundly secret as were the arrangements for the Napoleonft) coup- 
 d'itat of the 2d of December. Secrecy and prompt and decisive 
 action are the characteristics of centralized governments — publicity 
 and slow action those of decentralized ones.* Admit, however, that 
 such limitations be found in the treaty, by what right are they 
 there? The basis of such a treaty is the absolute right of the 
 author to his book ; and if that be admitted, with what show of 
 consistency or of justice can we undertake >to dictate to him whether 
 he shall sell or retain it — print it here or abroad ? With none, as I 
 think. 
 
 Admit, however, that he does print it, does the treaty require that 
 the market shall always be supplied ? Perhaps it docs, but most 
 probably it does not. If it does, does it also provide for the ap- 
 pointment of commissioners to see that the provision is always com- 
 plied With ? If it does not, nothing would seem to be easier than to 
 send out the plates of a large book, print off a small edition, and by 
 thus complying with the letter of the law, establishing the copy-right 
 for the long term of forty-two years, the moment after which the 
 plates could be returned to the place whence they came, and from that 
 place the consumers could be supplied on condition of paying largely 
 
59 
 
 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to the Times, to the profits of 
 Mr. Dickens's advertising sheet, to the author, to the London book- 
 seller, to his agent in America, and to the retail dealer here, In 
 cases like this, and they would he numerous, the " few cents" would 
 probably rise to be many dollars; and no way can, I think, be de- 
 vised to prevent their occurrence, except to' take one more step for- 
 ward in centralization by the appointment of commissioners in various 
 parts of the Union, to see that the market is properly supplied, and 
 that the books offered for sale have been actually printed on this side 
 of the Atlantic. 
 
 If the treaty does provide for publication here, it probably allows 
 some time for it, say one, two, or three months. It is, however, well 
 known that of very many books the first few weeks' sales constitute 
 so important a part of the whole, that were the publisher here de- 
 prived of them, the book would never be republished. No one 
 could venture to print until the time had elapsed, and by that time 
 the English publisher would so well have occupied the ground with 
 the foreign edition, that publication here would be effectually stopped. 
 Even under the present ad valorem sy tern of duties this is being done to 
 a great extent. One, two, or three hundred copies of large works are 
 cheaply furnished, and the market is thus just so far occupied as to 
 forbid the printing of an edition of one or more thousands — to the 
 material injury of paper-makers, printers, and bookbinders, and with- 
 out any corresponding benefit to the foreign author. Under the pro- 
 posed system this would be done to a great extent. 
 
 Admit, however, that the spirit of the lawbe fully complied with, 
 and let us see its effects. Mr. Dickens sells his book in England for 
 21s. ($5 00) ; and he will, of course, desire to have for it here as 
 large a price as it will bear. Looking at our prices for those 
 books which are copy-right, and of which the sale is large, he finds 
 that Blealc House contains four times as much as the Reveries of a 
 Bachelor, which sells for $1 25, and he will be most naturally led 
 to suppose that $3 is a reasonable price. The number of copies of 
 his book that has been supplied to American readers, through news- 
 papers and magazines, and in the book form, is certainly not 
 less than 250,000, and the average cost has not been more than 
 fifty cents, giving for the whole the sum of . . $125,000 
 
 To supply the same number at his price would cost . 750,000 
 
 Difference ..... $625,000 
 
60 
 
 Of Mr. Bulwer's last work, the number that has been 
 supplied to American consumers is probably but about 
 two-thirds as great, and the difference might not' amount 
 to more than ...... 350,000 
 
 Mr. Macaulay would not be willing to sell his book 
 more cheaply than that of Mr. Bancroft's is sold, or 
 $2 per volume, and he might ask $2 50. Taking it at 
 the former price, the 125,000 copie's that have been soM 
 would cost the consumer . . . $500,000 
 
 They have been supplied for . . 100,000 
 
 The difference here would be . . '$400,000 
 
 Mr. Alison's work would make twelve such vols, 
 as those of Mr. Bancroft, and his price would not be 
 less than $25. The sale has amounted, as I understand, 
 to 25,000 copies, which would give as the cost of the 
 
 whole $625,000 
 
 The price at which they have been sold is 
 $5, giving .... 126,000 
 
 Difference . .^ . . $500,000 
 
 Of Jane Eyre there have been sold 80,000, and if the 
 
 price had been similar to that of Fanny Fern, they 
 
 would have cost the consumers . . $100,000 
 
 They have cost about . . . 25,000 
 
 Difference .... $75,000 
 
 Total result of " a few cents" on five books . $1,950,000 
 
 Under the system of international copy-right, one of two things 
 must be dpne — either the people mmt be taxed in the whole of this 
 amount for the benefit of the various persons, abroad and at home, 
 who are now to be invested with the monopoly power, or they must 
 largely diminish their purchases of literary food. . 
 
 The quantity of books above given cannot be regarded as more 
 than one- twentieth of the total quantity of neW ones annually printed. 
 Admit, however, that the total were but ten times greater, and that 
 the differences were but one-fourth as great, it would be required that 
 this sum of $1,950,000 should be multiplied two and a half times, and 
 that would give about five millions of dollars ; which, added to the 
 sum already obtained, would make seven millions per annum ; and 
 yet we have arrived only at the commencement of the operation. All 
 
61 
 
 these books would require to be reprinted iii the next year, and the 
 next, and so on, and for the long period of forty-two years the pay- 
 ment on old books would require to be added to those on new ones, 
 until the sum would become a very startling one. To enable us to 
 ascertain what it is bound to become, let us see what it would now 
 be had this system existed in time past. Every one of Scott's novels 
 would still be copy-right, and such would be the case with Byron's 
 poems, and with all other books that have been printed in the last 
 forty-two years, of which the annual sale now amounts to many mil- 
 lions of volumes. To the present price of these let us add the charge 
 of the author, and the monopoly charges of the English and American 
 publishers, and it will be found quite easy to obtain a further sum 
 of five millions, which, added to that already obtained, would make 
 twelve millions per annum, or enough to give to one in every, four 
 thousand males, in the United Kingdom, between the ages of twenty 
 and sisty, a salary far exceeding that of our Secretaries of State. Let 
 this treaty be confirmed, and let the consumption of foreign works 
 continue at its present rate, and payment of this sum raust be made. 
 We can escape its payment only on condition of foregoing consump- 
 tion of the books. 
 
 The real cause of difficulty is not to be found in " the few cents" 
 required for the author, but in the means required to be adopted for 
 their collection. Everybody that reads Bleak Souse or Oliver Twist 
 would gladly pay their author some cents, however unwilling he might 
 be to pay dollars, or pounds. So, too, everybody who uses chloroform 
 would willingly pay something to its discoverer; and every one who 
 believes in and profits by homoeopathic medicines would be pleased 
 to contribute "a few cents" for the benefit of Hahnemann, his widow, 
 or his children. A single cent paid by all frho travel on steam ves- 
 sels would make the family of Fulton one of the richest in the world; 
 but how collect these " few cents" ? Grant me a monopoly, says the 
 author, and I will appoint an agent, who shall supply other agents 
 with my books, and I will settle with him. G-rant us a monopoly, 
 say the representatives of Hahnemann, and we will grant licenses, 
 throughout the Union, to numerous men who shall be authorized to 
 practise homoeopathically and collect our taxes. Were this experiment 
 tried, it would be found that millions would be collected", out of which 
 they would receive tens of thousands. Grant us a monopoly, might 
 say the representatives of Fulton, and we will permit no vessels to be 
 built without license from us, and bur agents will collect " a few 
 cents" from each passenger, by which we shall be enriched. So they 
 
62 
 
 might be; but for every cent that reached them the community would 
 be taxed dollars in loss of time and comfort, and in extra charges. It 
 is the monopoly privilege, and not the " few cents," that makes the 
 difficulty. 
 
 We are, however, advised by the advocates of this treaty that 
 English authors must be " required" to present their books in Ame- 
 rican " mode and dress," and that regard to their own interests will 
 cause them to be presented " at moderatiT prices for general con- 
 sumption." If, however, they have acted differently at home, why 
 should they pursue this course here ? That they have so acted, we 
 have proof in the fact that the British government has just been 
 forced to turn bookseller, with a view to restrain the owners of copy- 
 rights in the exercise of power. Who, again, is to determine what 
 prices are really " moderate" ones ? The authors ? Will Mr. Ma- 
 caulay consent that his books shall be sold for less than those of Mr. 
 Bancroft or Mr. Prescott ? Assuredly not. The bookseller, then ? 
 Will he not use his power in reference to f6reign books precisely as 
 he does now in regard to domestic ones ? If he deems it now expe- 
 dient to sell a 12mo. volume for a dollar or a dollar and a quarter, is 
 it probable that the ratification of this treaty will open his eyes to 
 the. fact that it would be better for him to sell Mr. Dickens's works 
 at fifty cents than at three dollars ? Scarcely so, as I think. It is 
 now about thirty years since the Sketch Book was printed, and the 
 cheapest edition that has yet been published sells for one dollar and 
 twenty-five cents. Jane Eyre contains probably about the same 
 quantity of matter, and sells for twenty-five cents. Of the latter, 
 about 80,000 have been printed, costing the consumers $20,000; but 
 if they were to purchase the same quantity of the former, they would 
 pay for them $100,000 ; difference, $80,000. What, now, would 
 become of this large sum? But little of it would reach the author; 
 not more, probably, than $10,000. Of the remaining $70,000, some 
 would go to printers, paper makers, and bookbinders, and the balance 
 would be distributed among the publisher, the trade-sale auctioneers, 
 and the wholesale and retail dealers ; and the result would be that 
 the public would pay five dollars where the author received one, or 
 perhaps the half of one. We have here the real cause of difficulty. 
 The monopoly of copy-right can be preserved only by oonnfecting it 
 with the monopoly of publication. Were it possible to say that who- 
 ever chose to publish the Sketch Book might do so, on paying to its 
 author "a few cents," the difficulty of this double monopoly would 
 be removed; but no author would consent tp this, for he could have 
 
63 
 
 no certainty that his book might not be printed by unprincipled men, 
 who would issue ten tbWsand while accounting to him for only a 
 single thousand. To enable him to collect his dues, he must have a 
 monopoly of publication. 
 
 It may be said that if he appropriate to his use any of the common 
 property of which books are made up, and so misuse his privilege as 
 to impose upon his readers the payment of too heavy a tas, other per- 
 sons may use the same facts and ideas, and enter into competition 
 with him. In no other case, however, than in those of the owners 
 of patents and copy-rights, where the public recognizes the existence 
 of exclusive claim to any portion of the common property, does it 
 pfermit the party to fix the price at which it may be sold. The right 
 of eminent domain is common property. In virtue of it, the com- 
 munity takes possession of private property for public purposes, and 
 frequently for the making of roads. Not unfrequently it delegates 
 to private companies this power, but it always fixes the rate of 
 charge to be made to persons who use the road. This is done even 
 when general laws are passed authorizing all who please, on com- 
 pliance with certain forms, to make roads to buit themselves. In such 
 eases, limitation would seem to be unnecessary, as new roads could 
 be made if' the tolls on old ones were too high ; and yet it is so well 
 understood that the making of roads does' carry with it monopoly 
 power, that the rates of charge are always limited, and so limited as 
 not to permit the road-makers to obtain a profit disproportioned to 
 the amount of their investments. In the case of authors there can 
 be no such limitation. They must have monopoly powers, and the 
 law therefore very wisely limits the time within which they may be 
 exercised, as in the other case ,it limits the price that may be charged. 
 In France, the prices to be paid to dramatic authors are fixed by law, 
 and all who pay may play ; and if this could be done in regard to all 
 literary productions, permitting all who paid to print, much of the 
 difficulty relative to copy-right would be removed ; but this course of 
 operation would be in direct opposition to the views of publishers 
 who advocate this treaty on the ground that it would add to " the 
 security and respectability of the trade." They would prefer to pay 
 for the copy- right of every foreign book, because it' would bring with 
 it monopoly prices and monopoly profits, both of which would require 
 to be paid by the consumers of books. To the paper-maker, printer, 
 and bookbinder, called upon to supply one thousand of a book for 
 the few, where before they had supplied ten thousand for the many, 
 it would be small consolation to know that they were thereby building 
 
e4 
 
 up the fortunes of two or three large puli^ing houses that had ob- 
 tained a monopoly of the business of replication, and were thus 
 adding to the " security and respectability of the trade." As little 
 would probably be derived from this source by the father of a family 
 who found that he had now to pay five dollars for what before had 
 coat but one, and must therefore endeavor to borrow, where before 
 he had been accustomed to buy the books reqtiired for the amusement 
 and instruction of his children. 
 
 Our State of New Jersey levies a transit duty of eight cents per 
 ton on all the merchandise that crosses it. Had the imposition of 
 this tax been accompanied by a law permitting all who chose to make 
 roads, no one would have complained of it/ as it would have been 
 little more than a fair tax on the property of the railroad and other 
 companies. Unfortunately, however, the course was different. To 
 the company that collected it was granted a monopoly of the power 
 of transportation, and that power has been so used that while the 
 State received but eight cents the transporlers charged three, five, 
 six, and eight dollars, for work that should have been done for one. 
 The position in which the authors are necessarily placed is precisely 
 the one in which our State has voluntarily placed itself. To enable 
 them to collect their dues, some person or persons must have a mo- 
 nopoly of publication, and they must and will collect five, ten, and 
 often twenty dollars for every one that reaches the author. The Union 
 would gain largely by paying into our treasury thrice the sum we 
 receive for transit duty, on the simple condition that we abolished the 
 monopoly of transportation ; and it would gain far more largely by 
 doing the same with foreign authors. If justice does really call upon 
 us to pay them, our true course would be to do it directly from the 
 Treasury, placing, if necessary, a million of dollars annually at the 
 disposal of- the British government, upon the simple condition that 
 it releases us from all claim to the monopoly of publication. Such a 
 release would be cheap, even at two millions ; enough to give $4,000 
 a. year to five hundred persons, and that number would certainly in- 
 clude all who can even fancy us under any obligation to them. My 
 own impression is, that no such payment is required by justice, either 
 as regards our own authors or foreign ones. Of the former, all can be 
 and are well paid, who can produce books that the public are wW,ing to 
 read, and no law that could be made would secure payment to those 
 who cannot. Their monopoly extends over a smaller number of per- 
 sons than does the English one; and if the more than thirty millions of 
 people who are subject to the latter cannot support their few writers, 
 
65 
 
 the cause of difficulty is^to' be found at home, and there must the 
 remedy he applied. NCTertheless, by adopting the course suggested, 
 we should certainly free ourselves from any necessity for choosing 
 between the payment of many millions annually to authors and the 
 men who stand between them and the public, on the one hand, and 
 of dispensing largely with the purchase of books, on the other. If 
 the nation must pay, the fewer persons through whose hands the 
 money passes the smaller will be the cost' to it, and the greater the 
 gain to the authors. ' 
 
 The ratification of the treaty would impose upon us a very large 
 amount of taxation that must inevitably be paid either in money 
 or in abstinence from intellectual nourishment; and our authors 
 should be able to satisfy themselves that the advantage to them 
 would bear some proportion to the loss inflicted upon others. 
 Would it do so ? I think not. On the contrary, they would find 
 their condition greatly impaired. All publishers prefer copy-right 
 bctoks, because, having a monopoly, they can charge monopoly profits. 
 To obtain a copy-right, they constantly pay considerable sums at 
 home for editorship of foreign books; but from the moment that this 
 treaty shall take effect, the necessity for doing this will cease, and thus 
 will our literary men be deprived of one considerable source of profit. 
 Again, literary labor in England is cheap, because of want of de- 
 mand ; but inter-national copy-right, by opening to it our vast market, 
 will quicken the demand, and many more books will be produced, 
 the authors of all of which will be competitors with our own, who 
 will then possess no advantages over them. The rates of American 
 authors will then fall precisely as those of the British ones will rise; 
 and this result will be produced as certainly as the water in the 
 upper chamber of a canal lock will fall as that in the lower one is 
 made to rise. On one side of the Atlantic literary labor is well paid, 
 and on the other it is badly paid. International copy-right will 
 establish a level; and how much reason our authors have to desire 
 that it shall be established, I leave it for them to determine. 
 
 The direct tendency of the system now proposed will be found to 
 be that of diminishing the domestic competition for the production of 
 books, and increasing our dependence on foreigners for the means of 
 amusement and instruction; and yet the confirmation of the treaty is 
 urged on the ground that it will increase the first and diminish the 
 last. If it would have this latter effect,- it is singular that the 
 authors of England should be so anxious for the measure as they are. 
 5 
 
66 
 
 It is not usual for men to seek to diminish the dependence of others 
 on themselves. 
 
 These, however, are, as I think, but a small part of the incon- 
 veniences to which our authors are now proposing to subject them- 
 selves. They have at present a long period allowed them, during 
 which they have an absolute monopoly of the particular forms of 
 words they ofiFer to the reading public ; and' this monopoly has, in a 
 very few years, become so productive, that authorship offers perhaps 
 larger profits than any other pursuit requiring the same quantity of 
 skill and capital. Twenty years hence, when the' market shall be 
 greatly increased, it may, and as I think will, become a question 
 whether the monopoly has not been granted for too long a period, and 
 many persons may then be found disposed to unite with Mr. Macaulay 
 in the belief that the disadvantages of long periods preponderate so 
 greatly over their advantages, as to make it proper to retrace in 
 part our steps, limiting the monopoly to twenty-one years, or one-half 
 the ptesent period. The inquiry may then come to be made, what is 
 the present value of a monopoly of forty-two years, as compared with 
 what would be paid for one of twenty-one years; and when it is found 
 that, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, one 
 will sell for exactly as much as the other, it will perhaps be decided 
 that no reason exists for maintaining the present law, even if no 
 change be now made. Suppose, however, the treaty to be con- 
 firmed, establishing the monopoly of foreigners in our market, and 
 that the people who have been accustomed to consume largely of 
 cheap literature should find themselves deprived of it, would not this 
 tend to hasten the period at which the existing law would come under 
 consideration? I cannot but think it would. The common school 
 makes a great demand for school-books, and both make a great demand 
 for newspapers. All of these combine to make a demand for cheap 
 books among an immense and influential portion of our community, 
 that cannot yet afford to pay $1 25 for Ferri Leaves or for the Reve- 
 ries of a Bachelor, although they can well afi'ord 25 cents for a num- 
 ber of Harper's Magazine, or for Jane Eyre. Let us now suppose 
 that the novels of Dickens and Bulwer, the books of Miss Aguilar, 
 and those of other authors with which they have been accustomed to 
 supply themselves, should at once be raised to monopoly prices, and 
 thus placed beyond their reach, would it notjproduoe inquiry into the 
 cause, and would not the answer be that we had given English authors 
 a monopoly in our market to enable our own to secure a monopoly in 
 that of England? Would not the sufferers next inquire by what 
 
67 
 
 process this had been accomplished, seeing that the direct representa- 
 tives of the people had always been so firmly opposed to it, and would 
 not the answer be that the literary men of the two countries had 
 formed a combination for the purpose of taxing the people of both ; 
 and that when they had failed to accomplish their object by means of 
 legislation, they had induced the Executive to interpose and make a 
 law in their favor, in defiance of the well-known will of the House of 
 Representatives ? Under such circumstances, would it be extraordi- 
 nary if we should, within three years from the ratification of the 
 treaty, see the commencement of an agitation -for a change in the 
 copy -right system ? It seems to me that it Tvould not. 
 
 The time for the arrival of this agitation would probably be hastened 
 by an extension of the system of centralization that would next be 
 claimed ; for the present measure can be regarded as little more than 
 the entering wedge for others. France and England profit enormously 
 by setting the fashions for the world. I^ew patterns and new articles 
 are invented that sell in the first season for treble or quadruple the 
 price at which they are gladly supplied in the second ; and it is by 
 aid of the perpetual changes of fashion that foreigners so much con- 
 trol our markets. Recently, our manufacturers have been enabled 
 to reproduce many new articles in very short time, .and this has 
 tended greatly to reduce the profits of foreigners, who are of course 
 dissatisfied. Copy-rights are now granted in both those countries for 
 new patterns, new forms of clothing, &c. &c., and our next step will be 
 towards the arrangement of a treaty for securing to the inventor of a 
 print, or a new fashion of paletot, the monopoly of its production in 
 our markets ; and when the claim for this shall be made, it wiH be 
 found to stand on precisely the same ground with that now made in 
 behalf of the producers of books, and must be granted. The French- 
 man will then have the exclusive right of sup^ilying us with new mous- 
 selines de lame, and the Englishman with now carpets and new forms 
 of earthenware ; and we shall be told that that is the true mode of 
 developing manufacturing and artistic skill among ourselves. How 
 much farther the system may be carried, it is difficult to tell, for, 
 when we shall once have established the system of regulating foreign 
 and domestic trade by treaty, the House of Representatives will 
 scarcely be troubled with much discussion of such affairs. Extremes 
 generally meet, and it will be extraordinary, if progress in that di- 
 rection shall not be followed by progress in the other, until our 
 authors shall, at length, become perfectly satisfied of the accuracy of 
 Mr. Macaulay, when he told the British authors, then claiming an 
 
68 
 
 extension of their monopoly to sixty years, that " the wholesome copy- 
 right" already existing would " share in the disgrace and danger 
 of the new copy-right" they desired to create.* They could scarcely 
 do better than study his speech at length. At present, they are ill- 
 advised, and their best friends will be those senators who, like Mr. 
 Macaulay, shall oppose their literary countrymen. 
 
 Admitting, however, that the measure proposed should not in any 
 manner endanger existing privileges, what would be the gain to our 
 authors in obtaining the control of the British market, compared with 
 what they would lose from surrendering the control of our own ? In 
 the former, the sale of books is certainly not large. Few have been 
 more popular than Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, and the price has 
 been, as I learn, only 7s., or $1 68. Nevertheless, a gentleman fully 
 informed in regard to it assures me that in fifteen years the average 
 sale has been but a thousand a year, or 15,000 in all.f Compare this 
 with the sale of a larger number of the Reveries of a Bachelor, or of 
 thrice the quantity of Fern Leaves, at but little lower prices, in the 
 short period of six months, and it will be seen how inferior is the 
 foreign market to the domestic one. Were it otherwise — were the 
 market of Britain equal to our own — could it be that we should so 
 rarely hear of her literary men, dependent oa their own exertions, but 
 as being poor and anxious for public employment ? Were it other- 
 wise, should we need now to be told of the "utter destitution" of the 
 widow and children of Hogg, so widely known as author of The 
 Queen's Wake, and as "The Shepherd" of Blackwood! s Magazine? 
 Assuredly not. Had literary ability been there in the demand in 
 which it now is here, he would have written thrice as much, and would 
 have been thrice as well paid, and would have provided abundantly 
 for his widow and his children. Nevertheless, our authors desire to 
 trade off this great market for the small one in which he shone and 
 
 * Macaulay's Speeches, vol. i. p. 403. 
 
 ■j- The sale here has been 200,000, at an averag? price of 80 cents. Had it 
 been copy-right, the price would have been double, and the " few cents" would 
 have made a difference on this single book of $100,000. The same gentleman 
 to whom I am indebted for the above facts informs me that he has paid to the 
 author of a 12mo. volume of 200 pages more than $2, 500.a'ii'i con'.d not now 
 purchase the copy-right for $10,000 ; that for another small 12mo. volume he 
 has paid $7,000, and expects to pay as much more ; that to a third author his 
 payments for the year have been $23,000, and ai*e likely to continue at that 
 rate for years to come ; and that it would be easy to furnish other and nu- 
 merous oases of similar kind. 
 
left his family to starve, and thus to make an exchange similar to 
 that of G-laucus when he gave a suit of golden armor for one of brass. 
 
 What, however, are the prospects for the future? Will the British 
 market grow ? It would seem not, for death and emigration are di- 
 minishing the population, and the people who remain are in a state 
 of constant warfare with their employers, who promised " cheap food" 
 that they might obtain " cheap labor," and now offer low wages in 
 connection with high-priced corn and beef. The people who receive 
 such wages cannot buy books. Hundreds of thousands of persons 
 are now out " on strike," or are " locked out" by the gentlemen who 
 advocate this "cheap labor" system; and the result of all this extra- 
 ordinary cessation from labor can be none other than the continued 
 growth of poverty, intemperance, and crime. The picture that is pre- 
 sented by that country is one of unceasing discord between the few 
 and the many, in which the former always triumph ; and a careful ex- 
 amination of it cannot result in leading us to expect an increase in the 
 desire to purchase books, or in the ability to pay for them. 
 
 Having looked upon that picture, let our authors next look to the 
 one now presented by this country, as compared with that which 
 could have been offered forty, thirty, or even twenty years since, and 
 to obtain aid in understanding the facts presented to their view, let 
 them read the following extract from a speech recently delivered by 
 Mr. Cobden : — 
 
 "You cannot point to an instance in America-, where the people are more 
 educated than they are here, of total cessation from labor by a whole com- 
 munity or town, given over, as it were, to desolation. When I came through Man- 
 chester the other day, I found many of the most influential of the manufacturing 
 capitalists talking yery carefully upon a report t^ich had reached them from 
 a gentleman who was selected by the government to go out to America, to 
 report upon the great exhibition in New Tork. That gentleman was one of 
 the most eminent mechanicians and machine-makers in Manchester, a man 
 known in the scientific world, and appreciated by men of science, from the 
 astronomer royal downwards. He has been over to America, to report upon 
 the progress of manufactures and the state of the mechanical arts in the 
 United States, and he has returned. No report^ from him to the government 
 has yet been published. But it has oozed out in Manchester that he found in 
 America a degree of intelligence amongst the manufacturing operatives, a state 
 of things' iiithe mechanical arts, which has convinced him that if we are to 
 hold our own, if we are not to fall back in the rear of the race of nations, we 
 must educate our people, to put them upon a level with the more educated 
 artisans of the United States. We shall all have the opportunity of judging 
 when that report is delivered ; but sufficient has already oozed out to excite a 
 great interest, and I might almost say some alarm." 
 
70 
 
 Having done this, let them next ask themselves what have been 
 the causes of the vast change in the relative positions of the two 
 countries. Doing this, will not the answer be, common schools, 
 cheap school-books, cheap newspapers, and cheap literature ? Has 
 not each and every one of these aided in making authors, and in 
 creating a market for their products ? Having thus laid the founda- 
 tion of a great edifice, are we likely to stop in the erection of the 
 walls ? Having in so brief a period created a great market for lite- 
 rature, is it not certain that it must continne to grow with increased 
 rapidity ? Assuredly it is ; and yet it is that vast market that our 
 authors desire to barter for one in which Hood was permitted almost 
 to starve, and in which Leigh Hunt, Lady Morgan, Miss Mitford, 
 Tennyson, and Sir Francis Head even now submit to the degradation 
 of receiving the public charity to the extent of a hundred pounds a 
 year ! The law, as it now exists, invites foreign authors to come and 
 live among us, and participate in , our advantages. The treaty offers 
 to tax ourselves for the purpose of offering them a bounty upon 
 staying at home and increasing their numbers and their competition 
 with the well-paid literary labor ot this country. Were Belgrave 
 Square to make a treaty with Grub Street, that each should have a 
 plate at the tables of the other, the population of the latter would 
 probably grow as rapidly as the dinners of the former would decline 
 in quality, and it might be well for our authors to reflect if such 
 would not be the result of the treaty now proposed. 
 
 Its confirmation is, as I understand, urged on some senators on 
 the ground that consistency requires it. Being in favor of protec- 
 tion elsewhere, they are told that it would be inconsistent to refuse 
 it here. In reply to this charge, it might fairly be retorted that 
 nearly all the supporters of international copy-right are advocates 
 of the system called, in England, Free-trade ; and that it is quite 
 inconsistent, in them to advocate protection here. To do this would, 
 however, be as unnecessary as it would be. unphilosophical. Both 
 are perfectly consistent. Protection to the farmer and planter in 
 their eiforts to draw the artisan to their side, looks to carrying out 
 the doctrine of decentralization by the annihilation of the monopoly 
 of manufactures established in Britain ; and our present copy-right 
 system looks to the decentralization of literature by offering to all who 
 shall come and live among us the same perfect protection that we give 
 to our own authors. What is called free trade looks to the mainte- 
 nance of the foreign monopoly for supplying! us with cloth and iron ; 
 and international copy-right looks to continuing the monopoly which 
 
71 
 
 Britain has so long enjoyed of furnishing us with books, and both 
 tend towards centralization. 
 
 The rapid advance that has been made in literature and science is 
 the result of the perfect protection afforded by decentralization. 
 Every neighborhood collects taxes to be expended for purposes of 
 education, atid it is from among those who would not otherwise be 
 educated, and who are thus protected in their efforts to obtain in- 
 struction, that we derive many of our most thoughtful and intelligent 
 men, and our best authors. The advocates of free trade and inter- 
 national copy-right are, to a great extent, disciples in that school in ' 
 which it is taught that it is an unjust interference with the rights of 
 property to compel the wealthy to contribute to the education of 
 the poor. Common schools, and a belief in the duty of protection, 
 are generally found together. Decentralization, by the production of 
 local interests, protects the poor printer in his efforts to establish a 
 country newspaper, and thus affords to the young writers of the 
 neighborhood the means of coming before the world. Decentraliza- 
 tion next raises money for the establishment of colleges in every part 
 of the Union, and thus protects the poor but ambitious student 
 in his efforts to obtain higher instruction than can be afforded by 
 the common school. Decentralization next protects him in the 
 manufacture of school-books, by creating a large market iot the pro- 
 ductions of his pen, a large portion of which is paid for out of the 
 product of taxes, the justice of which is denied by those who advocate 
 the British policy. Rising to the dignity of author of books for the 
 perusal of already instructed men and women, he finds himself pro- 
 tected by an absolute monopoly, having for its object to enable him 
 to provide for himself, his wife, and his childxen. Of all the people 
 of the Union, none enjoy such perfect protection as those connected 
 with literature; yet many of them oppose protection to all others, 
 while actively engaged in enlarging and extending the monopoly 
 they themselves enjoy. It will scarcely answer for them to charge 
 inconsistency on others. 
 
 How far the protection already granted has favoured the develop- 
 ment of literary tendencies, may be judged after looking to the 
 single case of dramatic writers, who are not protected against repre- 
 sentation without their consent; and, as that is their mode of publi- 
 cation, it follows that they do not enjoy the advantages granted to 
 other authors. The consequence is, that we make no progress in 
 that department of literature, while advancing rapidly in every other. 
 Permit me, my dear sir, to suggest that this is a matter worthy of 
 
72 
 
 your attention. There would seem to be no: good reason for refusing 
 to one class of authors what we grant so freely to all others. 
 
 Whether or not I shall have convinced you that international copy- 
 right should not he established, I cannot say, but I feel quite safe 
 in believing that you must be convinced it is a question which 
 requires to be publicly and fully discussed before we adopt any action 
 looking in that direction. It is not a case of urgency. If the treaty 
 be not confirmed, the only inconvenience to the authors will be delay, 
 and this should be afforded, were it only to enable them to reflect at 
 leisure upon the probable consequences of the measure in aid of which 
 they have invoked the Executive power. Should they continue to 
 believe their interests likely to be promoted by the adoption of such 
 a measure as that which has been so pertinaciously urged, the doors 
 of Congress will always be open to them, and justice, though it may 
 be delayed, will assuredly be done to them. Let them proceed in a 
 constitutional way, and then, should their desires be gratified, they 
 will have the satisfaction of knowing that their rights liave been ad- 
 mitted after full and fair discussion before the people. Should they 
 now succeed in obtaining, in secret session, .Ahe confirmation of a 
 treaty negotiated in private, and in haste, they will, I think, "repent 
 at leisure;" but repentance may, and probably will, come too late. 
 The mischief will then have been done. 
 
 Having now, my dear sir, to the best of my ability, complied with 
 your, request, I remain. 
 
 Yours, very respectfully, 
 
 HBNKY C. OAEEY. 
 
 Hon. James Cooper. Burlington, Nov. 28, 1853.