bute to the support of the families of those philosophers? Did
they contribute to their support while alive? Certainly not. To do so
would have been in opposition to the idea that the real contributors to
knowledge should be "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the
gentlemen who dress up their facts and ideas in an attractive form and
place them before the world in the form of cloth or books.

We are largely indebted to the labors of literary men, and they should be
well paid, but their claims to pecuniary reward have been much
exaggerated, because they have held the pen and have had always a high
degree of belief in their own deserts. Their right in the books they
publish is precisely similar to, and no greater than, that of the man who
culls the flowers and arranges the bouquets; and, when that is provided
for, their books are entitled to become common property. English authors
are already secured in a monopoly for forty-two years among a body of
people so large that a contribution of a shilling a head would enable each
and all of them to live in luxury; and if British policy prevents their
countrymen from paying them, it is to the British Parliament they should
look for redress, and not to our Executive. When they shall awaken to the
fact that "cheap labor" with the spade, the plough, and the loom, brings
with it necessarily "cheap labor" with the pen, they will become
opponents, and cease to be advocates of the system under which they
suffer. All that, in the mean time, we can say to them is, that we protect
our own authors by giving them a monopoly of our own immense and rapidly
growing market, and that if they choose to come and live among us we will
grant them the same protection. We may now look to the condition of our
own literary men.

LETTER V.

Our system is based upon an idea directly the reverse of the one on which
rests the English system--that of decentralization; and we may now study
its effects as shown in the development of literary tendencies and in the
reward of authors.

Centralization tends towards taxing the people for building up great
institutions at a distance from those who pay the taxes; decentralization
towards leaving to the people to tax themselves for the support of common
and high schools in their immediate neighborhood. The first tends towards
placing the man who has instruction to sell at a distance from those who
need to buy it; while the other tends towards bringing