f
copyright, to which the United States may at its pleasure become a party.

6. The benefit of copyright in the United States is not to take effect as
to any foreigner until the actual existence of either of the conditions
just recited, in the case of the nation to which he belongs, shall have
been made known by a proclamation of the President of the United States.

One very material benefit has been secured through international
copyright. Under it, authors are assured the control of their own text,
both as to correctness and completeness. Formerly, republication was
conducted on a "scramble" system, by which books were hastened through
the press, to secure the earliest market, with little or no regard to a
correct re-production. Moreover, it was in the power of the American
publisher of an English book, or of a British publisher of an American
one, to alter or omit passages in any work reprinted, at his pleasure.
This license was formerly exercised, and imperfect, garbled, or truncated
editions of an author's writings were issued without his consent, an
outrage against which international copyright furnishes the only
preventive.

Another benefit of copyright between nations has been to check the
relentless flood of cheap, unpaid-for fiction, which formerly poured from
the press, submerging the better literature. The Seaside and other
libraries, with their miserable type, flimsy paper, and ugly form, were
an injury alike to the eyesight, to the taste, and in many cases, to the
morals of the community. More than ninety per cent. of these wretched
"Libraries" were foreign novels. An avalanche of English and translated
French novels of the "bigamy school" of fiction swept over the land,
until the cut-throat competition of publishers, after exhausting the
stock of unwholesome foreign literature, led to the failure of many
houses, and piled high the counters of book and other stores with
bankrupt stock. Having at last got rid of this unclean brood, (it is
hoped forever) we now have better books, produced on good paper and type,
and worth preserving, at prices not much above those of the trash
formerly offered us.

At the same time, standard works of science and literature are being
published in England at prices which tend steadily toward increased
popular circulation. Even conservative publishers are reversing the rule
of small editions at high prices, for larger editions at low prices. The
old three-volume novel is ne