am aware that copyright must have a limit, because that is required
by the Constitution of the United States, which sets aside the earlier
Constitution, which we call the decalogue. The decalogue says you shall
not take away from any man his profit. I don't like to be obliged to
use the harsh term. What the decalogue really says is, "Thou shaft not
steal," but I am trying to use more polite language.

The laws of England and America do take it away, do select but one
class, the people who create the literature of the land. They always
talk handsomely about the literature of the land, always what a fine,
great, monumental thing a great literature is, and in the midst of their
enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to discourage it.

I know we must have a limit, but forty-two years is too much of a limit.
I am quite unable to guess why there should be a limit at all to the
possession of the product of a man's labor. There is no limit to real
estate.

Doctor Bale has suggested that a man might just as well, after
discovering a coal-mine and working it forty-two years, have the
Government step in and take it away.

What is the excuse? It is that the author who produced that book has
had the profit of it long enough, and therefore the Government takes
a profit which does not belong to it and generously gives it to the
88,000,000 of people. But it doesn't do anything of the kind. It merely
takes the author's property, takes his children's bread, and gives the
publisher double profit. He goes on publishing the book and as many of
his confederates as choose to go into the conspiracy do so, and they
rear families in affluence.

And they continue the enjoyment of those ill-gotten gains generation
after generation forever, for they never die. In a few weeks or months
or years I shall be out of it, I hope under a monument. I hope I shall
not be entirely forgotten, and I shall subscribe to the monument myself.
But I shall not be caring what happens if there are fifty years left of
my copyright. My copyright produces annually a good deal more than I
can use, but my children can use it. I can get along; I know a lot of
trades. But that goes to my daughters, who can't get along as well as I
can because I have carefully raised them as young ladies, who don't know
anything and can't do anything. I hope Congress will extend to them the
charity which they have failed to get from me.

Why, if a man who is not even mad, but