444 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



languages, I have never received anything from them except upon the 

 volume I wrote for the ' International Series,' and on that I have been 

 paid regularly by the English, French, German, and Italian, as well as 

 by the American publishers." Fifty volumes have now appeared in 

 that series, and the American publishers have voluntarily paid all the 

 foreign contributors the same as if they had been citizens of the 

 United States. And this they have done in spite of the fact that this 

 honorable arrangement has been disregarded, and various of the vol- 

 umes have been reprinted in shabby twenty-cent editions, on which, 

 of course, the authors have received nothing. 



This, then, is the way in which Mr. Harrison has been outraged. 

 He had his articles brought out in good shape for such of his friends 

 as desired to possess them in a separate form. He has been "plun- 

 dered " by being protected against plunder on the part of those who 

 might have issued a trivial and fugitive edition of his controversy, and 

 allowed him nothing for it. He has been " pirated " by having volun- 

 tarily secured for him the substantial benefits of an international copy- 

 right law. 



But Mr. Harrison's articles were used without his consent, and that 

 is what the charge of " piracy" here amounts to. His consent was not 

 asked, because it would have implied control of that over which he 

 had no control. If he had refused, that would not have stopped the 

 publication, but would have simply defeated the purposes of those who 

 knew better than Mr. Harrison did what required to be done. He was 

 not consulted for the simple reason, now obvious enough, that he would 

 be unlikely to make allowance for a state of things utterly different 

 from that to which he has been accustomed. He was not asked, be- 

 cause, while his assent would have done no good, his dissent would 

 have done injury to himself, to Mr. Spencer, and to the public. And 

 that Mr. Harrison would have withheld his consent is far from im- 

 probable. That the book was wanted here by many readers was 

 nothing to him, as is shown by the fact that, when a word would have 

 saved it from destruction, he declined to utter it. Something is of 

 course due to courtesy, but I was not at all certain that courtesy 

 would be met in the same spirit. The feeling of high-toned British 

 authors toward American " pirates " is not usually vented in gracious 

 expression. American experience with such authors is apt to en- 

 gender diffidence in approaching them. Those gentlemanly and 

 honorable publishers, the Messrs. Putnam, having special reasons re- 

 cently to make overtures to Mr. Ruskin for the use of one of his arti- 

 cles (to be paid for, of course), were deterred from doing so because 

 that author " absolutely declined to come into any relation with an 

 American publisher." Mr. Harrison is understood to be a particular 

 and punctilious man, and that he can, upon occasion, pretermit the 

 requirements of amiable civility, and take to "plain words," is amply 

 attested by his letter of May 29th to Herbert Spencer. 



