ofit that should have
gone to the wife and children.

When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman
asked me what limit I would propose. I said, "Perpetuity." I could see
some resentment in his manner, and he said the idea was illogical, for
the reason that it has long ago been decided that there can be no such
thing as property in ideas. I said there was property in ideas before
Queen Anne's time; they had perpetual copyright. He said, "What is a
book? A book is just built from base to roof on ideas, and there can be
no property in it."

I said I wished he could mention any kind of property on this planet
that had a pecuniary value which was not derived from an idea or ideas.

He said real estate. I put a supposititious case, a dozen Englishmen who
travel through South Africa and camp out, and eleven of them see nothing
at all; they are mentally blind. But there is one in the party who knows
what this harbor means and what the lay of the land means. To him it
means that some day a railway will go through here, and there on that
harbor a great city will spring up. That is his idea. And he has another
idea, which is to go and trade his last bottle of Scotch whiskey and his
last horse-blanket to the principal chief of that region and buy a piece
of land the size of Pennsylvania.

That was the value of an idea that the day would come when the Cape to
Cairo Railway would be built.

Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an
idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad
is another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which
represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that
did not exist before.

So if, as that gentleman said, a book does consist solely of ideas, that
is the best argument in the world that it is property, and should not be
under any limitation at all. We don't ask for that. Fifty years from now
we shall ask for it.

I hope the bill will pass without any deleterious amendments. I do seem
to be extraordinarily interested in a whole lot of arts and things that
I have got nothing to do with. It is a part of my generous, liberal
nature; I can't help it. I feel the same sort of charity to everybody
that was manifested by a gentleman who arrived at home at two o'clock
in the morning from the club and was feeling so perfectly satisfied with
life, so happy, and so comfortable, and there was his