IN BEHALF OF AN INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT.
Gentlemen:—You have the credit, at this moment, of ruling the world—at least your part of it; and cannot yet enact a single statute by which your share of worldly right and profit shall be secured to you. Walking, in the world’s eye, as strong and beautiful as angels, you cannot perform the day’s work, counted either in money or in bill-making influence, of a rude Missourian or a lean Atlantic citizen.
Aiding, as you do, by your inventive genius in all the great enterprises of the day—pushing forward every great and good undertaking to an issue of success—you lack the will or the skill to create a simple mill-contrivance by which your grain may be ground and bread furnished to your board.
You project, but do not realize. You sow, but do not reap. You sail to and fro—merchantmen and carriers to all the world of thought—the whole ocean over, but find no harbor and acquire no return. How much longer you will consent to keep the wheels of opinion in motion: to do the better part of the thinking and writing of these twenty-six States, without hire or fee, it rests with you to say. I merely put the case to you to see how it strikes you.
I address you in the mass, writers of books and framers of paragraphs together, because, at bottom, all who wield the pen have interests in common; and because I am anxious (I confess it) to have the whole force of the Press, whatever shape it takes, combined and consolidated against an injustice which could not live an hour if the Press knew its rights and its strength. The rights and the respectability of the one are, in the end, the rights and the respectability of the other; based in both cases on the worth and dignity of literary property.
No community is secure, it seems to me, where any law or fundamental right is systematically violated.
Either by instant vindication, through blood, and pillage, and massacre; or by the more silent and deadlier agency of the opposite wrong and a whole brood of fierce allies sprung from its loins, is this truth, at all times, asserted and made good. From the original wrong, lying in many cases close to the heart of society, there spreads a secret and invisible atmosphere of pestilence, in which all kindred rights moulder and decay, until their life at last goes out at a moment when no man had guessed at such a result. Neither statesmen nor people are, therefore, wise in tampering with a single principle: or in yielding a jot of the immutable truth to plausible emergency or the fair-seeming visage of an immediate good.
The law of property, in all its relations and aspects, is one of these primary anchors and fastenings of the social frame. And what evils, I am asked, have grown from the alleged neglect of literary property? I will mention one by way of illustration.
You are all of you aware, by this time, that the extensive printing and publishing establishment of Harper & Brothers, Cliff street, New York, was burned in the early part of June; and that a heavy loss accrued to them from the burning.
The fire was attributed, immediately after it occured, by the public prints to the hand of design. “It is supposed that one object of the incendiaries was to obtain copies of a new novel, by James, of which the Messrs. Harper had the exclusive possession.” Another paper enlarges this statement—“we see suspicions expressed that the object was to get possession of a new novel, ‘Morley Ernstein,’ which was in sheets, for cheap publication.” Here is a natural, logical sequence, and just such a one as might have been expected. If the conjecture should not prove a fact, it ought to be one, because this is just the period and the very order in which we might expect an incident of this kind to occur; perhaps not on quite so large a scale, nor with the necessary melo-dramatic admixture of fire. It might have been a plain burglary, prying a ware-house door open with a bar, for a copy; or, knocking a man over, at the edge of evening, and plucking the sheets from under his arm.