that admits our beef and grain and cheese should seem to seek
protection against a literary product which is brought into competition
with one of the great British staples, the modern novel. It seemed
inconsistent. But we are no more consistent ourselves. We cannot
understand the action of our own Congress, which protects the American
author by a round duty on foreign books and refuses to protect him by
granting a foreign copyright; or, to put it in another way, is willing to
steal the brains of the foreign author under the plea of free knowledge,
but taxes free knowledge in another form. We have no defense to make of
the state of international copyright, though we appreciate the
complication of the matter in the conflicting interests of English and
American publishers.

Yes; we must insist that, under the circumstances, the American people
have borne this outburst of English criticism in an admirable spirit. It
was as unexpected as it was sudden. Now, for many years our international
relations have been uncommonly smooth, oiled every few days by
complimentary banquet speeches, and sweetened by abundance of magazine
and newspaper "taffy." Something too much of "taffy" we have thought was
given us at times for, in getting bigger in various ways, we have grown
more modest. Though our English admirers may not believe it, we see our
own faults more clearly than we once did--thanks, partly, to the faithful
castigations of our friends--and we sometimes find it difficult to
conceal our blushes when we are over-praised. We fancied that we were
going on, as an English writer on "Down-Easters" used to say, as "slick
as ile," when this miniature tempest suddenly burst out in a revival of
the language and methods used in the redoubtable old English periodicals
forty years ago. We were interested in seeing how exactly this sort of
criticism that slew our literary fathers was revived now for the
execution of their degenerate children. And yet it was not exactly the
same. We used to call it "slang-whanging." One form of it was a blank
surprise at the pretensions of American authors, and a dismissal with the
formula of previous ignorance of their existence. This is modified now by
a modest expression of "discomfiture" on reading of American authors
"whose very names, much less peculiarities, we never heard of before."
This is a tribunal from which there is no appeal. Not to have been heard
of by an Englishman is next door to annihilati