Concerning the Suppressed Book. 579 



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 allow- 

 ance for a state of things utterly different from that to 

 which he has been accustomed. He was not asked, because, 

 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 improbable. 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 ex- 

 perience with such authors is apt to engender diffidence in 

 approaching them. Those gentlemanly and honourable 

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

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

 his articles (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. Har- 

 rison is understood to be a particular and punctilious 

 man, and that he can, upon occasion, pretermit the re- 

 quirements of amiable civility, and take to *' plain words," 

 is amply attested by his letter of May 29th to Herbert 

 Spencer. 



But, in the matter of " piracy," it is Mr. Spencer who 

 comes in for Harrison's hottest indignation. He accuses 

 him of having invented a new form of it, and aggravated 

 the offence by its clandestine perpetration. Now, let us see 

 what it was that Spencer did. After finishing the controversy 

 in the Nineteenth Century, Mr. Harrison transferred it to 

 the Pall Mall Gazette, in which he printed an additional 



