of the men who in the last half dozen years have
perished in the public service, some slight measure of justice, it may be
time to consider that question, but until then it should most certainly be
deferred.

The most active and earnest of all the advocates of literary _rights_
was, two years since, if the writer's memory correctly serves him, the
most thorough and determined of all our journalists in insisting on the
prompt dismissal of thousands and tens of thousands of men who, at their
country's call, had abandoned the pursuits and profits of civil life. Did
he, however, ever propose that they should be allowed any extra pay on
which to live, and by means of which to support their wives and children,
in the interval between discharge from military service and
re-establishment in their old pursuits? Nothing of the kind is now
recollected. Would he now advocate the enactment of a law by means of
which the widow and children of a major-general who had fallen on the
field should, so far as pay was concerned, be placed on a level with an
ordinary police officer? He might, but that he would do so could not with
any certainty be affirmed. She and they would, nevertheless, seem to have
claims on the consideration of American men and women fully equal to those
of the authoress of "Lady Audley's Secret," already, as she is understood
to be, in the annual receipt from this country of more than thrice the
amount of the widow's pension, in addition to tens of thousands at home.[1]

[Footnote 1: The London correspondent of Scribner and Co.'s "_Book
Buyer_" says that Miss Braddon's first publisher, Mr. Tinsley (who died
suddenly last year), called the elegant villa he built for himself at
Putney "Audley House," in grateful remembrance of the "Lady" to whose
"Secret" he was indebted for fortune; and Miss Braddon herself, through
her man of business, has recently purchased a stately mansion of Queen
Anne's time, "Litchfield House," at Richmond.]

It is, however, as we are gravely told, but ten per cent. that she asks,
and who could or should object to payment of such a pittance? Not many,
perhaps, if unaccompanied by monopoly privleges that would _multiply the
ten by ten and make it an hundred!_ Alone, the cost to our readers might
not now exceed an annual million. Let Congress then pass an act
appropriating that sum to be distributed among foreign authors whose works
had been, or might be republished here. _Th