ing-offices,
there could be no sale of verse and prose; that many a mechanical
invention,--the compass, for instance, the telescope, or the
steam-engine,--is quite as valuable as a book.

Prior to M. Montalembert, M. Charles Comte had laughed at the inference
in favor of mechanical inventions, which logical minds never fail to
draw from the privileges granted to authors. "He," says M. Comte, "who
first conceived and executed the idea of transforming a piece of wood
into a pair of sabots, or an animal's hide into a pair of sandals, would
thereby have acquired an exclusive right to make shoes for the human
race!" Undoubtedly, under the system of property. For, in fact, this
pair of sabots, over which you make so merry, is the creation of the
shoemaker, the work of his genius, the expression of his thought; to him
it is his poem, quite as much as "Le Roi s'amuse," is M. Victor Hugo's
drama. Justice for all alike. If you refuse a patent to a perfecter of
boots, refuse also a privilege to a maker of rhymes.

4. That which gives importance to a book is a fact external to the
author and his work. Without the intelligence of society, without its
development, and a certain community of ideas, passions, and interests
between it and the authors, the works of the latter would be worth
nothing. The exchangeable value of a book is due even more to the SOCIAL
CONDITION than to the talent displayed in it.

Indeed, it seems as if I were copying my own words. This proposition
of M. Wolowski contains a special expression of a general and absolute
idea, one of the strongest and most conclusive against the right of
property. Why do artists, like mechanics, find the means to live?
Because society has made the fine arts, like the rudest industries,
objects of consumption and exchange, governed consequently by all the
laws of commerce and political economy. Now, the first of these laws is
the equipoise of functions; that is, the equality of associates.

5. M. Wolowski indulges in sarcasm against the petitioners for literary
property. "There are authors," he says, "who crave the privileges of
authors, and who for that purpose point out the power of the melodrama.
They speak of the niece of Corneille, begging at the door of a theatre
which the works of her uncle had enriched.... To satisfy the avarice of
literary people, it would be necessary to create literary majorats, and
make a whole code of exceptions."

I like this virtuous irony. But