532 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



sustain the charge, the moral sense of the breeders of the whole 

 country, including Kentucky, was aroused, and I was really sur- 

 prised at the sudden death of the bantling and its burial out of 

 sight, but still more surprised that no man opened his head in 

 explanation or defense of the piracy, and thus was practically con- 

 fessed the truth of all that was charged against them. It is said 

 that Mr. Alexander, the proprietor of Woodburn, tightened the 

 reins on his over-ambitious manager, at this point, and admon- 

 ished him that his course had done great injury to the good name 

 of Woodburn, and that he must change it, and not attempt any 

 defense of what he had done. Whether this really occurred or 

 not I am not able to say, but it was just such a course as any 

 wise employer would adopt toward a reckless employee whose 

 course was destroying the good name of an establishment. It 

 then appeared to be my duty to go forward and under a decree 

 of the courts have this stolen property confiscated and destroyed, 

 according to law, but as the bantling was already very dead and 

 growing deader every day, with nothing left of it but a trace of 

 its putrescence in the nostrils of all honest men, I concluded that 

 the game was not worth the candle. 



Among the amusing things that were developed in the progress 

 of this controversy was Mr. Brodhead's peculiar views as to what 

 "copyright" really meant. He got the idea of restricting admis- 

 sion to the "Kegister" to animals possessing certain qualifica- 

 tions from the Monthly, 'and he formulated this idea into five or 

 six rules, expressed in eight or ten short printed lines and, as he 

 claimed, copyrighted this idea. He evidently seemed to think 

 he had invented a rat-trap and got his patent on it. and that no 

 man dare make any rules restricting registration, so long as he 

 safely held the patent on his rat-trap. He could see no differ- 

 ence between a patent right and a copyright. An "idea" cannot 

 be copyrighted, no difference whether it be expressed in one 

 printed line, or in a dozen. The copyright law is constructed 

 for the special and only purpose of protecting the author in the 

 results and products of his labor. The work of seeking, tracing 

 and establishing the pedigrees of trotting horses had been pushed 

 forward persistently, laboriously and expensively for more than 

 twelve years, and it had grown into a vast accumulation of facts 

 of imperishable value to the whole horse world, and every line 

 of it was protected under the copyright law; but because it didn't 

 conform to his "rat-trap" idea he seems to have persuaded him- 



