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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



is that the bread and butter are both 

 stolen, and because theft is bad for 

 those who lose their property, and 

 worse for those who get it. A nation 

 can not tolerate palpable dishonesty 

 without vital injury to itself. One in- 

 justice leads to another, and demor- 

 alization spreads. Selfish advantages 

 openly override correct principles, and 

 then, worst of all, come the mental 

 obliquity and confusion resulting from 

 attempts to palliate and excuse injus- 

 tice. If a flagrant wrong is long and 

 widely practiced, there will always be 

 plenty to rally for its defense some 

 dishonestly, from interested motives, 

 and others with a senseless siucerity 

 from innate crookedness, cloudiness, or 

 eccentricity of mind. These crotchety, 

 whimsical, and erratic intellects are 

 found both at home and abroad, and 

 they often prove capable of doing con- 

 siderable mischief. 



Matthew Arnold affords the last ex- 

 ample of this mental freakishness, in 

 his article on the copyright question, 

 in the March " Fortnightly Eeview." 

 The article has excited a good deal of 

 comment, and no little commendation, 

 but it seems to us eminently unsatis- 

 factory. We find no fault with the 

 conclusion at which he arrives, which 

 was intimated years ago, when he 

 joined fifty other English authors in 

 recommending the scheme of inter- 

 national copyright, which originated in 

 this country, and which there has been 

 much reason for thinking could be prac- 

 tically carried out. But, while Mr. Ar- 

 nold's decision is sound, we think it 

 would have been wise if he had with- 

 held his reasons for it. They are not 

 such as will bring other men to the 

 same result. They are such as will 

 carry other men to the opposite con- 

 clusion. So far as logic is concerned, 

 Mr. Arnold takes substantially the same 

 ground as that taken by Mr. J. M. 

 Stoddart, the Philadelphia publisher, 

 who is engaged in pirating the "Ency- 

 clopaedia Britannica." They both agree 



that nobody's rights are violated, as 

 there are no rights in the case. Mr. 

 Arnold's point of view in regard to 

 copyright is quite his own. Here, as 

 everywhere else, he is haunted by the 

 spirit of " Philistinism." The undesira- 

 ble practice of appropriating an author's 

 works is a miserable piece of middle- 

 class indelicacy. " The spirit of the 

 American community and Government 

 is the spirit, I suppose, of a middle-class 

 society of our race, and this is not a 

 spirit of delicacy. One could not say 

 that in their public acts they showed in 

 general a spirit of delicacy ; certainly 

 they have not shown that spirit in deal- 

 ing with authors." 



Mr. Arnold pursues this thought 

 more fully. He says : " The interests 

 of English authors will never be safe in 

 America until the community as a com- 

 munity gets the sense in a higher de- 

 gree than it has now for acting with 

 delicacy. It is the sense of delicacy 

 which has to be appealed to, not the 

 sense of honesty. Englishmen are fond 

 of making the American appropriation 

 of their books a question of honesty ; 

 they call the appropriation stealing ; if 

 an English author drops his handker- 

 chief in Massachusetts they say the na- 

 tives may not go off with it, but if he 

 drops his poem they may. This style 

 of talking is exaggerated and false ; 

 there is a breach of delicacy in reprint- 

 ing the foreigner's poem without his 

 consent, there is no breach of honesty. 

 But a finely touched nature, in men or 

 nations, will respect the sense of deli- 

 cacy in itself, not less than +he sense 

 of honesty." 



Now, there can not be the slightest 

 objection to this appeal to the sense of 

 delicacy and honor in the effort to se- 

 cure legal protection to the property of 

 authors. It may be that there are those 

 who would be moved by this considera- 

 tion and no other ; and if Mr. Arnold 

 had been content to devote his paper to 

 this view of the case, there would have 

 been no reason to complain of him. 



