PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION. 507 



a physical actuality; or a copyright given for the flight of fancy 

 of a poet not embodied in the materiality of a manuscript or in 

 the pages of a printed book. John Milton sold Paradise Lost to 

 Samuel Simmons, bookseller, for five pounds ready money; but 

 Gray's " mute, inglorious Miltons," who only imagined and never 

 wrote, could never have obtained a copyright or any money offer 

 whatever — no, not even reputation — for their imaginings, though 

 for all that the world knows they might have been infinitely superior 

 to the Milton who became glorious because he was not mute, in all 

 that relates to mental attainment. 



" A person can read from a book, can quote from it, use its ideas 

 in speaking and writing, and even attempt to pass them off as his 

 own, and he will find no legal obstacle to such action. But the 

 moment he tries to duplicate the material form in which the ideas 

 appeared, that moment he passes from the realm of the intangible 

 to that of the tangible " ; for the book, which is the concrete thing 

 in which the author has embodied his ideas, is an entity, and because 

 an entity representing embodied labor is property which the law will 

 protect to the owner, and can also legitimately tax, if it will. There 

 have been repeated decisions by the courts * that there can be no 

 property in ideas — until, for example, an author through a copy- 

 right, or an inventor through a patent, has put his ideas in such tan- 

 gible form that the Government can put its stamp upon them. 



It is also exceedingly curious to note how Shakespeare, whose 

 range and accuracy of knowledge were so wonderful, clearly per- 

 ceived, and as clearly expressed, the whole essence of modern po- 

 litical economy and jurisprudence in respect to this immediate 

 problem, when, in the following lines from A Midsummer-Night's 

 Dream, he says: 



" The poet's eye, io a fine frenzy rolling, 

 Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 

 And, as imagination bodies forth 

 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 

 Turas them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 

 A local habitation and a name."' 



* Some years since an action was brought in a United States court by one Kortenhaus 

 against the American Watch Company, of Waltham, Mass., to recover royalties on an im- 

 provement in stem-winding watches that he made, and which, he averred, the defendants 

 had put to use without his consent and without awarding him any compensation therefor. 

 The plaintiff swore that he had submitted his invention to the company's inspection with 

 the view of selling it, but it refused to purchase, and he discovered afterward that the 

 company had adopted the improvement, and that he had made the mistake of not patent- 

 ing it. The court dismissed the action, and ruled that there was no right of property in an 

 idea as an idea, and that it could only be made property by letters patent. Had, however, 

 a patent been secured upon the improvement, its value as property would have been un- 

 doubtedly very considerable. 



