564 Edzuard Livings to?i Youmans. 



" This is not a simple case of clandestine reprint. Those of us 

 who do not take elaborate precautions are exposed to have what they 

 write appearing in unauthorized American editions. But it does 

 surprise me that an English writer should connive at this treatment 

 of another English writer with whom he had been carrying on an 

 honourable discussion. It is, I think, something new, even in Ameri- 

 can piracy, to reissue an author's writings behind his back, and sell 

 them interlarded with hostile comment. Reprints, even while they 

 plunder us, spare us the sight of our sentences broken on the same 

 page with such amenities as 'he complacently assumes,' 'loose and 

 misleading statements,' etc. You avow, in your letter of yesterday, 

 that you supplied these comments to my articles ; and if internal 

 evidence did not show them to be yours, by your offer to me to re- 

 publish them now in England, you treat them as yours. I know no 

 instance of such a practice. It is as if I were piratically to reprint 

 your Data of Ethics, freely interspersed with a running commentary 

 on your practice of ethics, and were to justify my act on the ground 

 that I had had a controversy with you, and that I had heard your 

 friends were about to reprint it. 



" There is one minor point which serves to show the kind of pub- 

 lication in which you have chosen to take part. My articles in this 

 volume are followed by a cutting from a newspaper account of what 

 the editor calls ' The Little Bethel of the Comtists.' As the volume 

 bears as its subtitle the words, ' A Controversy between Frederic 

 Harrison and Herbert Spencer,' that newspaper paragraph would 

 only be relevant if it referred to practices in which I had some part, 

 or which I approved. It is w^ell known that I have nothing to do 

 with anything of the kind, and never countenanced it. Nothing ot the 

 sort has ever been heard in Newton-hall, where for years past I have 

 presented Positivism as I understand it. The matter is a small bit of 

 polemical mischief; those who are engaged in plunder are not likely 

 to be fair. But I think it is quite unworthy of a place in a volume for 

 which you are responsible, and which you have authorized and adopt. 



" You now propose to me to republish this volume in England, 

 where you admit it could not appear without the consent of all con- 

 cerned. After what you have done I must decline to act with you. 

 I leave your conduct to the judgment of men of sense and of honour. 



" I am faithfully yours, 



*' Mr. Herbert Spencer. Frederic Harrison." 



