f Chatham, I am reminded of America's great friend
in the other House, and wish I could quote to Congress what was
uttered in her behalf, in her darkest hour, by the noble-hearted
Burke.[9]--"Every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every
prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance
inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may
enjoy others.... As we must give away some natural liberty to enjoy
civil advantages, so we must sacrifice some civil liberties _for the
advantages to be derived from the communion and fellowship of a great
empire_." This is what the orator called so beautifully "the chords of
a man;" and when America has well digested a principle thus laid down
for her sake in the Parliament of England, she will feel that her
political right to refuse just protection to the British author will
be a moral right only when she is able to forego the advantages of
literary communion and fellowship with the British empire.

This matter of copyright has been so naturally debated as concerning
the Anglo-Saxon race alone, that I too have written as if the same
principles (though with less glaring necessity) did not extend to all
nations and languages of the earth. But I, for one, shall not be
content with less than their universal application. Happy, indeed,
will be the day when a British author puts pen to paper, feeling that
he addresses himself at once to--what is almost equivalent to
posterity--twenty millions of men in another hemisphere, and extending
from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouths of the St Lawrence, among whom
the author's is a sacred name, and when the aspiring American youth
can thank his Government for making him proprietor of his literary
creations wherever the law of England prevails upon the surface of the
round world. But there are interests in which all men are brethren,
and in which their brotherhood should be mutually and heartily
conceded. Next to our holy religion is that interest which belongs to
the interchange of ideas and a knowledge of each other's humanities.
Best of all will be the time, then, when the literature of all
Christian nations acquires an essential unity, not by spoliation and
wrong, but by mutual good offices; promoting the fraternization of
contemporary literatures, and holding together that precious wealth
bequeathed to the world by the bountiful and often suffering genius of
bygone generations.

Forgive me, dear Godfrey, th