Literary Property and International Copyright. 113 



However, in time, he begins to fear he is befooled. He calls, and will 

 have an answer one way or other. Then a further short delay is 

 required to re-peruse, or to consider. That delay is really wanted to 

 copy the manuscript by a machine. The manuscript is returned with 

 a compliment; but the author is told he is not yet quite ripe for pub- 

 lic;)! ion ; lie is paternally advised to study certain models (British) and 

 encouraged to bring another manuscript improved by these counsels. 

 Ods Nestor! it reads like criticism, and paternal advice. The novice 

 yields his own judgment; sighs many times if he is a male, if female 

 has a little gentle cry that the swine earth is tenanted by, are not asked 

 to pity nor even comprehend ; and the confiding American youth, 

 thinking gray hairs and grave advice must be trustworthy, sets to 

 work to discover the practical merit that must lie somewhere or other 

 at the bottom of British mediocrity and " decent debility"; he never 

 suspects that the sole charm of these mediocre models lies not in the 

 British platitudes and rigmarole, but in the Latin word gratis. While 

 thus employed, he sees, one fine day, some sketches of life in Califor- 

 nia, Colorado, or what not, every fact and idea of which has been 

 stolen from his rejected MS., and diverted from its form, and re- 

 worded and printed ; while he, the native of a mighty continent, has 

 been sent away, for mundane instruction, to the inhabitants of a 

 peninsula on the north coast of France." 



The late Mr. Emerson, in his calmer style, wrote thus : 

 "There are men in this country who can put their thoughts in 

 brass, fti iron, stone or wood ; who can build the best ships for freight, 

 aud the swiftest for ocean race. Another makes revolvers, another a 

 power press. But scarcely one of our authors has thrown off British 

 swaddling clothes. The great secret of the world-wide success of 

 'Uncle Tom' was its novelty ; it had something peculiarly American 

 in it. The works of American authors have been smothered under 

 English authors in the American market. Not only has the whole- 

 sale system of mal-appropnation most injuriously affected the interests 

 of living American authors, but it has a tendency to dwarf down the 

 original literature of the United States to a servile copyism, and to 

 check the development of the national mind." 



It should be stated in justice to some of our leading publishers, that 

 they deny the charge of piracy, and assert that they have been in the 

 habit of paying foreign authors for reprints. It appears from letters 

 addressed by them to " The Critic," in 1882, that the Appletons had 

 paid a ten per cent royalty on the retail price to Herbert Spencer, 

 Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lubbock, and others ; that J. B. Lippincott 

 & Co. paid Ouida £300 for each of her novels, and as much for some 



