LETTER VI.

We have commenced the erection of a great literary and scientific edifice.
The foundation is already broad, deep, and well laid, but it is seen to
increase in breadth, depth, and strength, with every step of increase in
height; and the work itself is seen to assume, from year to year, more and
more the natural form of a true pyramid. To the height that such a
building may be carried, no living man will venture to affix a limit. What
is the tendency to durability in a work thus constructed, the pyramids of
Egypt and the mountains of the Andes and of the Himalaya may attest. That
edifice is the product of decentralization.

Elsewhere, centralization is, as has been shown, producing the opposite
effect, narrowing the base, and diminishing the elevation. Having
prospered under decentralization, our authors seek to introduce
centralization. Failing to accomplish their object by the ordinary course
of legislation, they have had recourse to the executive power; and thus
the end to be accomplished, and the means used for its accomplishment, are
in strict accordance with each other.

We are invited to grant to the authors and booksellers of England, and
their agent or agents here, entire control over a highly important source
from which our people have been accustomed to derive their supplies of
literary food. Before granting to these persons any power here, it might
be well to inquire how they have used their power at home. Doing this, we
find that, as is usually the case with those enjoying a monopoly, they
have almost uniformly preferred to derive their profits from high prices
and small sales, and have thus, in a great degree, deprived their
countrymen of the power to purchase books; a consequence of which has been
that the reading community has, very generally, been driven to dependence
upon circulating libraries, to the injury of both the authors and the
public. The extent to which this system of high prices in regard to
school-books has been carried, and the danger of intrusting such men with
power, are well shown in the fact that the same government which has so
recently concluded a copyright treaty with our own, has since entered
"into the bookselling trade on its own account," competing "with the
private dealer, who has to bear copyright charges." The subjects of this
"reactionary step" on the part of a government that so much professes to
love free trade, are, as we are told, "the famous school-books of