agreement with popular English authors for the payment of copyright,
and works thus reprinted cost the buyer no more than under the
privateering policy. But without some definite establishment of legal
rights and remedies, the publisher is at the mercy of a dishonorable,
sometimes of a vindictive competition, and must run the risk of
having the market flooded within a week with a cheaper and inferior
edition, reprinted from the sheets of his own which had been
honorably paid for. We do not pretend to argue the question of
literary property, the principle of it being admitted in the fact
that we have any copyright-laws at all. Our wish is to show, that, in
the present absence of settled law, the honest publisher is subjected
to risks from the resultant evils of which the whole reading
community suffers. The publisher, to protect himself, is forced to
make his reprint as cheaply as possible, and to hurry it through the
press with the disregard of accuracy inseparable from hasty
publication,--while the reader is put in possession of a book
destructive of eyesight, crowded with blunders, and unsightly in
appearance. Maps and plates are omitted, or copied so carelessly as
to be worse than useless; and whoever needs the book for study or
reference must still buy the original edition, made more costly
because imported in single copies, and because taxed for the
protection of a state of things discreditable in every way, and not
only so, but hostile to the true interests of both publishers and
public.

We do not claim any protection of American authorship from foreign
competition, but we cannot but think it unfair that British
authorship should be protected (as it now practically is) at the cost
of our own, and for the benefit of such publishers as are willing to
convey an English book without paying for it. The reprint of a
second-rate work by an English author has not only the advantage of a
stolen cheapness over a first-rate one on the same subject by an
American, but may even be the means of suppressing it altogether. The
intellectual position of an American is so favorable for the
treatment of European history as to overbalance in some instances the
disadvantages arising from want of access to original documents; yet
an American author whose work was yet in manuscript could not
possibly compete with an English rival, even of far inferior ability,
who had already published. If, within the last few years, a tolerably
pop