men of letters on the business
side, that literature is still an infant industry with us, and so far
from having been protected by our laws it was exposed for ninety years
after the foundation of the republic to the vicious competition of
stolen goods. It is true that we now have the international copyright
law at last, and we can at least begin to forget our shame; but
literary property has only forty-two years of life under our unjust
statutes, and if it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out
the aggressors and punish them, as it would seek out and punish the
trespassers upon any other kind of property; but it leaves the
aggrieved owner to bring suit against them, and recover damages, if he
can. This may be right enough in itself; but I think, then, that all
property should be defended by civil suit, and should become public
after forty-two years of private tenure. The Constitution guarantees
us all equality before the law, but the law-makers seem to have
forgotten this in the case of our infant literary industry. So long as
this remains the case, we cannot expect the best business talent to go
into literature, and the man of letters must keep his present low grade
among business men.

As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standing
at all. I may say that it is only since the was that literature has
become a business with us. Before that time we had authors, and very
good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but I do not remember
any of them who lived by literature except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and
we all know how he lived; it was largely upon loans. They were either
men of fortune, or they were editors, or professors, with salaries or
incomes apart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped
out with public offices; one need not go over their names, or classify
them. Some of them must have made money by their books, but I question
whether any one could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his
books brought him. No one could do that now, unless he wrote a book
that we could not recognize as a work of literature. But many authors
live now, and live prettily enough, by the sale of the serial
publication of their writings to the magazines. They do not live so
nicely as successful tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other
professions when they begin to make themselves names; the high state of
brokers, bankers, railroad operators, and the like i