nationality? Why should the property of the manufacturer
of cloths, carpets, satins, and any and every description of goods, be
able to send his products all over the world, subject only to the tariff
laws of the various countries, while the author (alone of all known
producers) is forbidden to do so? The existing law of our country says to
the foreign author, "You can have property in your book only if you
manufacture it into salable form in this country." What would be said of
the wisdom or wild folly of a law which sought to protect other American
industries by forbidding the importation of all foreign manufactures?

No question of tariff protection is here involved. What duty shall be
imposed upon foreign products or foreign manufactures is a question of
political economy. The wrong against which authors should protest is in
annexing to their terms of ownership of their property a protective
tariff revision. For, be it observed, this is a subject of abstract
justice, moral right, and it matters nothing whether the author be
American, English, German, French, Hindoo, or Chinese,--and it is very
certain that when America shall enact a simple, just, copyright law,
giving to every human being the same protection of law to his property in
his mental products as in the work of his hands, every civilized nation
on earth will follow the noble example.

As it now stands, authors who annually produce the raw material for
manufacturing purposes to an amount in value of millions, supporting vast
populations of people, authors whose mental produce rivals and exceeds in
commercial value many of the great staple products of our fields, are the
only producers who have no distinct property in their products, who are
not protected in holding on to the feeble tenure the law gives them, and
whose quasi-property in their works, flimsy as it is, is limited to a few
years, and cannot with certainty be handed down to their children. It
will be said, it is said, that it is impossible for the author to obtain
an acknowledgment of absolute right of property in his brain work. In our
civilization we have not yet arrived at this state of justice. It may be
so. Indeed some authors have declared that this justice would be against
public policy. I trust they are sustained by the lofty thought that in
this view they are rising above the petty realm of literature into the
broad field of statesmanship.

But I think there will be a general agreement