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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ernment upon the subject I regard as wholly indefensible. Its policy 

 is an outrage upon a class of men who are public benefactors, a dis- 

 grace to the country, and a scandal to civilization. Grover Cleve- 

 land's republic does not recognize that Frederic Harrison and Her- 

 bert Spencer have any right of property in the products of their brain- 

 work. 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 prop- 

 erty 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 Gov- 

 ernment 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 hon- 

 orable 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 adver- 

 tising, 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 dif- 

 ferent 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 



