rce left. We must betake ourselves to
copyright, be the inconveniences of copyright what they may. Those
inconveniences, in truth, are neither few nor small. Copyright is
monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of
mankind attributes to monopoly. My honourable and learned friend
talks very contemptuously of those who are led away by the theory that
monopoly makes things dear. That monopoly makes things dear is certainly
a theory, as all the great truths which have been established by the
experience of all ages and nations, and which are taken for granted in
all reasonings, may be said to be theories. It is a theory in the same
sense in which it is a theory that day and night follow each other, that
lead is heavier than water, that bread nourishes, that arsenic poisons,
that alcohol intoxicates. If, as my honourable and learned friend seems
to think, the whole world is in the wrong on this point, if the real
effect of monopoly is to make articles good and cheap, why does he stop
short in his career of change? Why does he limit the operation of so
salutary a principle to sixty years? Why does he consent to anything
short of a perpetuity? He told us that in consenting to anything short
of a perpetuity he was making a compromise between extreme right and
expediency. But if his opinion about monopoly be correct, extreme right
and expediency would coincide. Or rather, why should we not restore the
monopoly of the East India trade to the East India Company? Why should
we not revive all those old monopolies which, in Elizabeth's reign,
galled our fathers so severely that, maddened by intolerable wrong, they
opposed to their sovereign a resistance before which her haughty spirit
quailed for the first and for the last time? Was it the cheapness and
excellence of commodities that then so violently stirred the indignation
of the English people? I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it
for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles
scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad. And I may with equal
safety challenge my honourable friend to find out any distinction
between copyright and other privileges of the same kind; any reason why
a monopoly of books should produce an effect directly the reverse of
that which was produced by the East India Company's monopoly of tea, or
by Lord Essex's monopoly of sweet wines. Thus, then, stands the case. It
is good that authors should be remunera