INTERNATIONAL IN AMERICA 351
disposition in the United States to withhold justice from English authors, but objecting to any "kind of legal saddle for the English publisher to ride his author into the American book-market " ; in response to which Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Froude, Carlyle, and others had signed a memorial to Lord Granville expressing a willingness to accept a copyright on the condition of confining American copyright to Ameri- can assigns of English authors, and excluding English publishers. Mr. Appleton's bill was opposed in a mi- nority report by Edward Seymour, of the Scribner house, on the ground that it was " in no sense an inter-^ national copyright law, but simply an act to protect American publishers" ; that the desired "protection" could be evaded by English houses through an Ameri- can partner ; and that the act was objectionable in pro- hibiting stereos, in failing to provide for cyclopaedias, and in enabling an American publisher to exclude revised editions.
A meeting of Philadelphia publishers, January 27, Philadelphia 1872, opposed international copyright altogether. Protest, 1873 in a memorial declaring that "thought, when given to the world, is, as light, free to all"; that copy- right is a matter of municipal (domestic) law; that any foreigner could get American copyright by becoming an American citizen; and that "the good of the whole people and the safety of republican insti- tutions" would be contravened by putting into the hands of foreign authors and "the great capitalists on the Atlantic seaboard " the power to make books high.
The Executive Committee of the Copyright Asso- The Bristed elation met in New York, February 2, 1872, and proposal, put forward Charles Astor Bristed's bill securing, * ^* after two years from date of passage, to citizens of other countries granting reciprocity, all the rights of American citizens.
