Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/547

Rh former pretensions have been worth. This northern gust will blow the dust away from many people's eyes.

But the American people ought not to have waited for this. It should have been settled on grounds of justice for the benefit of the national character. It is a serious question and a plain one—not easy to adjust, but still wholly practicable. It is one of those palpable matters in which where there is a will there is certain to be found a way. One of the worst things about it is that our practice shows to the world the low and disgraceful state of American morality. We have published the evidence of Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer before the English Commission on Copyright, and every one who has read it will be struck by the clear and elevated ethical tone that pervades it. These men are thought by many to be very bad, but they are men who know what is right and believe in it and maintain it unflinchingly. Has the occupant of one American pulpit ever been known to call attention to this great national disgrace? International copyright is one of those questions that measure the degree of civilization. It indicates the high-water mark of the public conscience, the strength of the sense of justice, and how far it is overborne by the dictates of self-interest. It is a case in which wrong may be perpetrated with apparent impunity. More obtrusive questions which arise between people of different countries are liable to be complicated with fear, and justice is often extorted by a dread of the consequences of withholding it, rather than by the simple force of the conviction of right. But authors can't fight for their rights, nor will governments protect them by the force of arms. They must be content, therefore, to appeal to the moral sense and the sentiment of public honor. Military redress being out of the question, there remains only the resort to those civil agencies by which private rights are protected, and the vigor with which these act under the inspiration of public feeling tests the degree of civil progress or the condition of civilization. From this point of view the American Republic occupies the lowest place among the leading nations of the civilized world; and from the scorn of all honest men we can only escape by setting this matter right by some form of national action.

And the naked right of the case is palpable enough, though, from the obtuseness or indifference of the popular mind upon the subject, it can not be too frequently or too forcibly presented. What we have written elsewhere upon this point we now repeat, that it may have a more permanent record:

The basis of an author's right of property in the book he makes is the same as the farmer's right in the wheat he raises. They are each the product of capital and labor. In one case capital is invested in land, implements, and stock; in the other it is invested in education, books, and suitable arrangements for literary life; while in both the product is the direct result of work done. The property in his work belongs to an author because there has been expense in its preparation, and because he has produced it by his immediate personal exertion. It is his to possess and to profit by its proceeds, by all the principles of justice which confer the ownership of any property. Questions may arise respecting acquired rights in literary property; but the original right of him who called it into existence by his own labor is clear and beyond question.

It is often said that ideas are ethereal things, and belong to the spiritual world, and therefore can not become subject to ownership; that is, not being material property, they can not be real property. Others, again, curiously affirm that ideas may be property while yet in the thinker's mind, but cease to be so the moment they are sent forth and made useful to others; or that thought until expressed or published is the property of the thinker; when given to the world, like light, it is free to all. Now there is, of course, a profound difference between ideas and material commodities, but there is no such difference as is here implied. They are both products of human exertion. A sonnet is as much the result of bodily effort as a horseshoe. The author works with one material instrument, the