"Then I had better at once go over your accounts thoroughly. I shall probably be here several days."
History tells us that for a long time the English Parliament forbade any newspaper to publish a line of what was said there. A disobedient editor was speedily imprisoned. The members desired to receive bribes for their votes in as many cases as possible. If a member could keep his constituents in ignorance of the way he voted, he could often make money by voting in opposition to their interests. Of course, he dreaded to have the newspapers turn the light on his record, and he developed many remarkable arguments against such privileges on the part of the press. When more light streams in on certain publishers' methods, authors may then be able to select better men to represent them.
It has been said that the jealousy of authors is such as to keep them from working in harmony; that authors who have won their spurs have a supreme contempt for one who has not; that they omit no opportunity of indulging in sarcasm at his expense; that they would not throw him a plank if he were drowning, unless they could so throw it as to strike him on the head. If this were so, they would not differ much from the world in general, for it will not give quarter to any man who cannot claim it by his own might. But the case of Mr. Besant, the president of the English Society, disproves these sweeping statements against authors. He stands among the foremost of living novelists, and yet he is willing to spend a great deal of his valuable time to assist a writer just beginning to climb the tiresome ladder. This pure and undefiled religion of being willing to help a fellow-toiler is far more common than cynics will allow. It prevails among engineers, factory hands, and miners. With the exception of a few cads, it is doubtful if authors have sunk so low in the scale of humanity as to be unwilling to assist each other, when by so doing they will help themselves.
Some authors have been dreaming of a time when they could control the entire literary output of the United States in the same way that the Standard Oil Company controls kerosene, or the chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers directs his men. He can tie up any railroad with a snap of his finger if his men are not treated squarely. In such a literary dreamland an author might do one-third of his present work and get far more pay than now. Publishers and editors would not then have a superfluity of matter. They would then have to bow to the authors' trust before the desired material could be obtained.
It might be claimed that if writers would pool their issues, put their manuscripts into a common stock, allow the publisher to select from them at a good round figure, and after a certain lapse of time burn all the rejected ones,—there would be less work and more money for all authors. Of course, it would be necessary to have a committee to decide when an author wrote well enough to be admitted to the pool, and also to determine what greater portion of the common fund the authors of specially meritorious work should receive.
Such a scheme certainly does work with sugar, kerosene, starch, and numberless other articles; but it is more than doubtful if it would prevail in literature. Some authors would be too desirous of seeing themselves constantly before the public. They could not be prevailed upon to limit the output of their brain, and they would be conceited enough to demand that everything appear in print.
It is well to lay aside thoughts of such a Utopia until we have secured an authors' protective association of wide membership, with permanent headquarters, legal counsel, and agents to learn the publishing business and expose unfair methods.
Let writers remember that Greece, in spite of her Æschylus, Sophocles, Xenophon, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato, and Aristotle, perished because her independent states would not combine against a common foe.
John Braincraft.
Louisville, Ky.