ernment upon the subject I regard as wholly indefensible. Its policy is an outrage upon a class of men who are public benefactors, a disgrace to the country, and a scandal to civilization. Grover Cleveland's republic does not recognize that Frederic Harrison and Herbert Spencer have any right of property in the products of their brainwork. Their productions when brought to the United States belong neither to them nor to anybody else. They are not protected by law, and may be appropriated by anybody without violation of law. There are many in this country who realize the vice of this policy quite as vividly as the foreign victims of it, and who are laboring hard to put an end to it. But, without offering a word of apology for it, there is still something to be said in behalf of those who are compelled to act under a bad state of things which they reprobate, but are for the time powerless to remedy. It is certainly unjust to involve these in the indiscriminate condemnation of the vicious system. It is a good deal easier to denounce it at a distance than to fight it on the spot. Nor is it possible for authors, living under a government which so stringently protects them that they acquire the habit of regarding literary property as something peculiarly sacred, to fully appreciate the difficulties of publication and the course which business must take under entirely opposite circumstances, where literary property is without any legal protection. With no international copyright it is certainly impossible to act as if we had one. That the Government does not protect him, and that if protected at all it must be done by himself, is the first and vital fact that has to be taken into account when any publisher makes the venture of reissuing a foreign book in this country. The Government is, in fact, his enemy, and virtually calls upon everybody to make war upon him. However disposed he may be to treat a foreign author well, to bring out his work in respectable shape, and pay him for it fairly, he meets this ugly circumstance at the threshold of the transaction, that the money he puts into it may be sunk because anybody can reprint the work in cheaper form and without paying the author anything. Nor is this all: the more honorable he is, the worse it is for him. Any sense of liberality he may indulge works directly against him. If he publishes the book in good form, pays a decent royalty, and makes it properly known by advertising, all this is a temptation to other parties to take advantage of his outlay, and the reputation the book acquires by means of it, to fill the market with mean editions that kill the honest publication. The American publisher is therefore compelled to adopt a policy very different from that in England, where books are vigilantly and effectively protected by law. He has to conform to the necessities of a lawless state of things, and must be left to make the best he can of it.
But the indiscriminate charges of the London "Times" are not true; all American publishers are not freebooters and pirates. Although it is not possible for them to treat foreign authors with full justice in
