Concerning the Suppressed Book. 573 



respectable shape, and pay him for it fairly, he meets this 

 ugly circumstance at the threshold of the transaction, that 

 the money he puts into it may be sunk because anybody 

 can reprint the work in cheaper form and without paying 

 the author anything. Nor is this all ; the more honourable 

 he is, the worse it is for him. Any sense of liberality he 

 may indulge works directly against him. If he publishes 

 the book in good form, pays a decent royalty, and makes 

 it properly known by advertising, all this is a temptation 

 to other parties to take advantage of his outlay, and the 

 reputation the book acquires by means of it, to fill the 

 market with mean editions that kill the honest publication. 

 The American publisher is therefore compelled to adopt a 

 policy very different from that in England, where books 

 are vigilantly and effectively protected by law. He has to 

 conform to the necessities of a lawless state of things, and 

 must be left to make the best he can of it. 



But the indiscriminate charges of the London Times are 

 not true; all American publishers are not freebooters and 

 pirates. Although it is not possible for them to treat for- 

 eign authors with full justice in the absence of international 

 copyright, yet it is false that these authors are preyed upon 

 in the unqualified way asserted by the Times. There are, 

 of course, American publishers, and plenty of them, who 

 are thoroughly unscrupulous; but there are others, and 

 they are not a few, who do the best they can under the 

 present demoralizing system to compensate foreign authors 

 for their work. They pay them by voluntary arrangement, 

 not the rates that they are accustomed to at home, and not 

 always perhaps as much as they might, but often, as I hap- 

 pen to know, to their own loss, when books are reprinted 

 by others and the market supplied by degraded editions on 

 which the author receives nothing. In the absence of an 

 international copyright law, this voluntary action of Ameri- 

 can publishers is the only thing practicable or possible to 



