"That Chatham's language is their mother tongue."
How good it is, then, to strengthen the bond by which Almighty God has made two households still one family, especially when so many ties of mutual interests, commerce, and literature work together to corroborate the operation of nature!
Speaking of Chatham, I am reminded of America's great friend in the other House, and wish I could quote to Congress what was uttered in her behalf, in her darkest hour, by the noble-hearted Burke. [9] —"Every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others.... As we must give away some natural liberty to enjoy civil advantages, so we must sacrifice some civil liberties for the advantages to be derived from the communion and fellowship of a great empire." This is what the orator called so beautifully "the chords of a man;" and when America has well digested a principle thus laid down for her sake in the Parliament of England, she will feel that her political right to refuse just protection to the British author will be a moral right only when she is able to forego the advantages of literary communion and fellowship with the British empire.
This matter of copyright has been so naturally debated as concerning the Anglo-Saxon race alone, that I too have written as if the same principles (though with less glaring necessity) did not extend to all nations and languages of the earth. But I, for one, shall not be content with less than their universal application. Happy, indeed, will be the day when a British author puts pen to paper, feeling that he addresses himself at once to—what is almost equivalent to posterity—twenty millions of men in another hemisphere, and extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouths of the St Lawrence, among whom the author's is a sacred name, and when the aspiring American youth can thank his Government for making him proprietor of his literary creations wherever the law of England prevails upon the surface of the round world. But there are interests in which all men are brethren, and in which their brotherhood should be mutually and heartily conceded. Next to our holy religion is that interest which belongs to the interchange of ideas and a knowledge of each other's humanities. Best of all will be the time, then, when the literature of all Christian nations acquires an essential unity, not by spoliation and wrong, but by mutual good offices; promoting the fraternization of contemporary literatures, and holding together that precious wealth bequeathed to the world by the bountiful and often suffering genius of bygone generations.
Forgive me, dear Godfrey, that my letter, which began with a song, should thus conclude with a sermon. It is a very long letter, and I wish I could advise you to defer the reading of it till our friend the Vicar comes again to dine at the Hall. I would get you to read the first half to him, and ask him to declaim the remainder to you; but I know you would fall into your inveterate failing of shutting your eyes to meditate, and going into a sound sleep at the most interesting point of the discourse. Yours, &c.
To Godfrey Godfrey, Esq., &c. &c. &c.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] N. A. Review, vol. lvi. p. 227.
[3] N. A. Review, vol. xlviii. p. 257.