Page:Copyright, Its History And Its Law (1912).djvu/392

 36o

COPYRIGHT

President

Cleveland's

second

message,

1886

Campaign of 1887

" In vain we call old notions fudge, ;

And bend our conscience to our dealing ; Tiie Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing."

On May 21, 1886, the Committee on Patents pre- sented a report to the Senate, favoring the Chace bill, but no action resulted.

In President Cleveland's annual message Decem- ber 6, 1886, at the opening of the second session, he called the attention of Congress to the fact that "the drift of sentiment in civilized communities toward full recognition of the rights of property in the crea- tion of tl^e human intellect has brought about the adoption by many important nations of an Interna- tional Copyright Convention, which was signed at Berne iSth of September, 1885. . . . I trust the subject will receive at your hands the attention it deserves, and that the just claims of authors, so urgently pressed, will be duly heeded." But the Congress ad- journed without heeding them.

Senator Chace reintroduced his bill into the Fif- tieth Congress, December 12, 1887. In the same month there was organized the American Publishers' Copyright League, with William H. Appletonas presi- dent and George Haven Putnam as secretary, and from that time forward the authors' and publishers' leagues acted in close cooperation. Copyright asso- ciations were formed in Boston, Chicago and else- where, to influence Congress and the public; Henry van Dyke, especially by his address on "The national sin of piracy," and other clergymen helped to empha- size the moral issue, and authors' readings held in New York, Washington and elsewhere brought the ques- tion widely to public notice and helped to raise funds for the campaign. During this period, R. U. Johnson, associate editor of the Century magazine, who had