copyright now before the Senate, my views are
different. Several of my books have been published abroad, and my
publisher here tells me, that to prevent the republication of others he is
obliged to supply them cheaply for foreign markets, and thus am I deprived
of a fair and just reward for my labors. Copyright should be universal and
eternal, and such, I am persuaded, will be the result at which you will
arrive when you shall have thoroughly studied the subject."

Having studied it, and having given full consideration to the views that
they and others had presented, your answer would probably be to the
following effect: "It is clear, gentlemen, from your own showing, that
there are two distinct classes of persons engaged in the production of
books--the men who furnish the body, and those who dress it up for
production before the world. The first class are generally poor, and
likely to continue so. They labor without any view to pecuniary advantage.
They are, too, very generally helpless. Animated to their work solely by a
desire to penetrate into the secrets of nature the character of their
minds unfits them for mixing in a money-getting world, while you are
always in that world, ready to enforce your claims to its consideration.
As a consequence of this, they are rarely allowed even the credit that is
due to them. Their discoveries become at once common property, to be used
by men like yourselves, and for your own individual profit. We have here
among ourselves a gentleman who has given to astronomy a new and highly
important law essential to the perfection of the science, the discovery of
which has cost him the labor of a life, as a consequence of which he is
poor and likely so to remain. Important as was his discovery, his name is
already so completely forgotten that there is probably not a single one
among you that can now recall it, and yet his law figures in all the
recent books. Is this right? Has _he_ no claim to consideration?"

"In answer, you will say, that 'to admit the existence of any such rights
is not only impossible, but _inexpedient_, even were it possible.
Knowledge advances by slow and almost imperceptible steps, and each is but
the precursor of a new and more important one. Were each discoverer of a
new truth to be authorized to monopolize the teaching of it millions of
men, to whom, by our aid, it is communicated, would remain in ignorance of
it, and thus would farther advance be prevented. In all