e
indebted for the power to make your book, and we require you, in your
turn, to contribute towards the augmentation of the stock that is to be
used by your successors." This is justice, and to grant more than this
would be injustice.

Let us turn now, for a moment, to the producers of works of fiction. Sir
Walter Scott had carefully studied Scottish and Border history, and thus
had filled his mind with facts preserved, and ideas produced, by others,
which he reproduced in a different form. He made no contribution to
knowledge. So, too, with our own very successful Washington Irving. He
drew largely upon the common stock of ideas, and dressed them up in a new,
and what has proved to be a most attractive form. So, again, with Mr.
Dickens. Read his "Bleak House" and you will find that he has been a most
careful observer of men and things, and has thereby been enabled to
collect a great number of facts that he has dressed up in different forms,
but that is all he has done. He is in the condition of a man who had
entered a large garden and collected a variety of the most beautiful
flowers growing therein, of which he had made a fine bouquet. The owner of
the garden would naturally say to him: "The flowers are mine, but the
arrangement is yours. You cannot keep the bouquet, but you may smell it,
or show it for your own profit, for an hour or two, but then it must come
to me. If you prefer it, I am willing to pay you for your services, giving
you a fair compensation for your time and taste." This is exactly what
society says to Mr. Dickens, who makes such beautiful literary bouquets.
What is right in the individual, cannot be wrong in the mass of
individuals of which society is composed. Nevertheless, the author objects
to this, insisting that he is owner of the bouquet itself, although he has
paid no wages to the man who raised the flowers. Were he asked to do so,
he would, as I shall show in another letter, regard it as leading to great
injustice.

LETTER II.

Let us suppose, now, that you should move, in the Senate, a resolution
looking to the establishment of the exclusive right of making known the
facts, or ideas, that might be brought to light, and see what would be the
effect. You would, as I think, find yourself at once surrounded by the
gentlemen who dress up those facts and ideas, and issue them in the form
of books. The geographer would say to you: "My dear sir, this will never
do. Look at my book, and y