608 Literary Property. [ June, 
deposited ; in France and Austria, two ; and in the Netherlands, three ; 
but in several of these countries the délivery is not necessary, unless 
copyright is intended to be claimed.” But with us the public libraries* 
actually sweep off eleven copies of every work which issues from the 
press. It is true, that on those of small value and extensive editions, the 
loss of eleven copies may not be felt as a very grievous sacrifice ; yet, 
even with reference to these we cannot help admitting the proposition of 
the authors in their able petition to the House in 1818. “To deliver 
eleven copies out of the regular number is a subtraction from the 
petitioners and their assigns of the whole trade sale price of those 
eleven copies when the impression sells; and if the impression should 
not sell, then the petitioners are aggrieved by the loss of the amount of 
the paper and printing of so many copies; and they submit, that if this 
amount be in some cases not large, yet it is considerable in the aggregate 
of the whole quantity demanded ; and no law of any country has made 
the amount of any property the measure or the standard of right and 
justice respecting it: the smallest quantity of value is protected to every 
one as much as the greatest ; the legal right is the same, whatever be the 
pecuniary amount ; and all penal codes for the preservation of property 
are founded on this natural principle so essential to the general welfare 
of society.” 
Of the extent of “the aggregate of the whole quantity demanded,” 
the evidence of a few of the booksellers affords us some slight 
indication. In their petition of the 9th April, 1813, the Edinburgh 
booksellers stated, that in the books recently published, and then in the 
course of publication at Edinburgh, the amount would not be less than 
one thousand four hundred and twenty-six pounds eight shillings and 
sixpence. In the petition of Messrs. Longman and Co., presented in 
1818, it was declared that, since the passing of the act of 1814, and the 
date of the petition, the eleven copies of works delivered by their house 
to the eleven libraries, had cost them three thousand pounds, or nearly 
so ; and, in the general petition of the London booksellers, presented in 
the March following, it appeared that, during the same time, the cost to 
Mr. Murray had been one thousand two hundred and seventy-five 
ounds. 
. The method of estimating the loss, not at the selling, but at the cost 
price of the copies, was happily exposed by Lord Althorp in the debate 
which arose on bringing up the petition of the authors in 1818. “ With 
respect to the Right Honourable and learned Gentleman’s (now Lord 
Plunkett) observation on the mode of calculating the evil, surely, if a 
farmer was obliged to give away a bushel of wheat which he could sell 
at a certain sum, the loss he would sustain would not merely be what 
the bushel had cost himself, but the price at which he might sell it.” 
Supposing the tax, however, to press comparatively lightly on one 
class of works, it may be imagined with what weight it will fall on the 
other, when it is remembered that Mr. Sharon Turner handed in to the 
committee of 1813 a jist of eleven, on which it would have amounted to 
five thousand six hundred and ninety-eight pounds one shilling. Of 
these, one alone, The British Gallery of Engravings, made up one 
* These libraries are the Royal Library, the libraries of the Universities of Oxford and 
Cambridge, and of the four Universities in Scotland; the library of Sion College in Lon- 
don, of the Faculty of Advocates, in Edinburgh, and the libraries of Trinity College, and 
the King’s Inns, Dublin. 
