ly taxed for helping those
who are unable to help themselves. To carry out the views of the
benevolent men to whom we are indebted for all these stone, bricks, and
lumber, they must remain common property. You may, if you will, convert
them into a house, and, in consideration of the labor and skill required
for so doing, we will grant you, during a certain time, the privilege of
letting the rooms, at your own price, to those who desire to occupy them;
but at the close of that time the building must become common property, to
be disposed of as we please." This is exactly what the community says to
the gentlemen who employ themselves in converting its common property into
books, and to say more would be doing great injustice.

The length of time for which the building should be thus granted would
depend upon the number of persons that would be likely to use the rooms,
and the prices they would be willing to pay. If lodgers were likely to be
few and poor, a long time would be required to be given; but if, on the
contrary, the community were so great and prosperous as to render it
certain that all the rooms would be occupied every day in the year, and at
such prices as would speedily repay the labor and skill that had been
required, the time allowed would be short. Here, as we see, the course of
things would be entirely different from that which is observed in regard
to books, the monopoly of which has increased in length with the growth,
in wealth and number, of the consumers, and is now attempted, by the aid
of international copyright, to be extended over millions of men who are
yet exempt from its operation.

The people of this country own a vast quantity of wild land, which by slow
degrees acquires a money value, that value being due to the contributions
of thousands and tens of thousands of people who are constantly making
roads towards them, and thus facilitating the exchange of such commodities
as may be raised from them. These lands are common property, but the whole
body of their owners has agreed that whenever any one of their number
desires to purchase out the interest of his partners he may do so at $1.25
per acre. They do not _give_ him any of the common property; they require
him to purchase and pay for it.

With authors they pursue a more liberal course. They say: "We have
extensive fields in which hundreds of thousands of men have labored for
many centuries. They were at first wild lands, as wild as those o