434 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



edge or consent. I learn accidentally that a volume has appeared in New York, 

 which consists of three recent articles of yours in the Nineteenth Century, 

 printed alternately with three recent articles of mine, with an introduction, 

 notes, and appendix. This re-issue of my articles was made without the knowl- 

 edge of myself, or of the proprietor of the Nineteenth Century, and he tells me 

 that it is a case of piracy. 



" You now avow (in your letter to me of yesterday) that the volume was 

 issued by your American publishers, and was edited by your friend Professor 

 Youmans, after consultation with you, with your consent and assistance. You 

 also avow that you furnished the editor with controversial comments on my arti- 

 cles, and requested him to append them in his own way that is to say, you have 

 abetted a clandestine reprint of three articles of mine, interpolated with notes 

 supplied by yourself. I regard this, not only as an act of literary piracy, but as 

 a new and most unworthy form of literary piracy. May I ask if it is proposed 

 to hand you the profits of a book of which I am (in part) the author, or are 

 these to be retained by your American publishers and friend ? 



" To justify this act you now write that you expected republication in 

 America by my friends. This expectation rests, I can assure you, on a pure 

 invention. No friend of mine, nor any person whatever in America or in Eng- 

 land, has ever suggested to me the republication of my articles, nor have I ever 

 heard or thought of such a project. You quote to me, as your authority, a letter 

 from Professor Youmans, who simply says there is danger of its being done by 

 others, and he adds that I am coming to lecture in America. Again, this is a 

 pure invention. I have never thought of lecturing in America, or of going there, 

 nor has any one on either side of the Atlantic suggested to me to do so. Those 

 who ' convey ' my writings will as readily invent my intentions. Inquiry would 

 have shown that neither I nor my friends had any intention of reprinting any 

 articles much less yours. And I fail to see how an unverified report that they 

 might be reprinted, coupled with an unverified report that I was going to lecture 

 in America, coidd justify you in promoting and assisting in the unauthorized 

 issue and sale of writings of mine. 



" This is not a simple case of clandestine reprint. Those of us who do not 

 take elaborate precautions are exposed to have what they write appearing in 

 unauthorized American editions. But it does surprise me that an English writer 

 should connive at this treatment of another English writer, with whom he had 

 been carrying on an honorable discussion. It is, I think, something new, even 

 in American piracy, to re-issue an author's writings behind his back, and sell 

 them interlarded with hostile comment. Reprints, even while they plunder us, 

 spare us the sight of our sentences broken on the same page with such amenities 

 as ' he complacently assumes,' ' loose and misleading statements,' etc. You 

 avow, in your letter of yesterday, that you supplied these comments to my arti- 

 cles ; and if internal evidence did not show them to be yours, by your offer to 

 me to republish them now in England, you treat them as yours. I know no 

 instance of such a practice. It is as if I were piratically to reprint your ' Data 

 of Ethics,' freely interspersed with a running commentary on your practice of 

 ethics, and were to justify my act on the ground that I had had a controversy 

 with you, and that I had heard your friends were about to reprint it. 



" There is one minor point which serves to show the kind of publication in 

 which you have chosen to take part. My articles in this volume are followed 

 by a cutting from a newspaper account of what the editor calls ' The Little 

 Bethel of the Comtists.' As the volume bears as its subtitle the words, ' A Con- 



