Î'ANADIAN COPYEIGHT. 7 



struggle to redeem his fortune by his pen, while thousands, aye hundreds of thousands, 

 of American readers were deriving pleasure and profit from his writings. It must surely 

 awaken some sense of remorse in the minds of American appreciators, who have adorned 

 their parlours with his statues, and their galleries with his portraits, to reflect that if Scott 

 had received his honest dues for the editions of his works printed and sold in America, it 

 might have transformed the sorrowful tragedy of his closing years into a bright and happy 

 eventide ? Authors of his type are rare ; but it would not be difficult to name a consider- 

 able list of gifted men and women, to whom the enjoyment of the profit of works, the 

 product of their genius and toil, would have made all the difference between the depress- 

 ing drudgery of writing for bread and such ease as might have reflected itself in their 

 inspired writings. 



But it is a narrow view of the question which assumes the author as a mere producer 

 of marketable articles, and a bread-winner. A large portion of the highest class of litera- 

 ture makes no pecuniary return to the author for his expenditure of labour, time, research, 

 and actual outlay of money in the production of his work. It is his, as is the land which 

 the industrious settler has by years of laborious toil redeemed from the wilderness ; or as 

 the manufactured goods of the producer, who by labour and ingenious skill transforms 

 the raw material, the wool, cotton, hemp, or flax, into the marketable goods that are so 

 large a source of national wealth, and the property in which is jealously guarded by the 

 laws of every civilized community. But Canadians have hitherto moved in the wake of 

 their more enterprising neighbours, and been content to share the fruits of the energetic 

 if somewhat unscrupulous doings of American aggraudizers. They have been educated 

 accordingly, until the convenient results have come to be regarded as their just rights. 



It does not seem to suggest itself to most Canadians that the author's right of property 

 in the product of his brain, of his time, study, labour and pecuniary outlay, is a matter of 

 any importance. It is treated as a mere question between English and Canadian printers 

 and publishers ; as though the " Idyls of the King " and the " Descent of Man," Carlyle's 

 " Frederick the Great, " or Bryce's "American Commonwealth" were the mere work of 

 the type-setter. 



But American publishers, after systematically flourishing on the property of British 

 authors, and printing and selling pirated editions of every popular English work, in utter 

 contempt of their rights or wishes, have at length been shamed into the grudging conces- 

 sion of a meagre instalment of the honest recognition of an author's rights ; and our 

 Canadian legislators forthwith proceeded to take this as their model. 



"With the view of eliciting some expression of public opinion on the question of 

 Canadian Copyright, I addressed letters on the subject to two of our leading Toronto 

 papers. One of the replies is so essentially of a representative character and of value now, 

 as emanating from the secretary of an organization claiming to have had a leading part in 

 the movement that led to the framing of the Copyright Act of 1889, that I reproduce its 

 chief arguments here. Its author, Mr. Richard T. Laucefield, the librarian of the Hamilton 

 city library, writes, as I understand with the advantage of long experience in the itinerant 

 book trade. He thus begins his letter " on the Canadian Copyright Act " : 



" As the secretary of the body that was mainly instrumental in directing Sir John 

 Thompson's attention to the necessity for a new Canadian Copyright Act, I desire to 

 add a few remarks to the recent discussion on this question . in. the columns of the 



