Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/548

532 mechanic with another. The mechanic produces a hat, for example, by muscular action; and the author produces a book by brain action. In both cases the result represents vital power continuously expended; there has been exhaustion of the bodily energies in both cases alike. The blood represents the stock of vital power, and it is drawn upon in muscular action by the laborer and in cerebral action by the author. An author, too, has need for a large amount of blood to sustain his thinking. Physiologists tell us that the brain is more immediately dependent upon a copious supply of blood than any other part of the system. They say that, although the average brain is but one thirty-sixth the weight of the body, it demands one fifth of all the blood to keep it in working order. Ideas, then, are bodily products, and are at the expense of the blood; and the books containing them represent the life-forces and spent vitality of their authors. The elements of blood come from the market and have their price. Food and clothing, and the conveniences of living, are neither sent to authors from heaven, nor are they furnished gratuitously by government. Like other people, those who make books depend upon their labor to live, and they have an equal right with other people to the fruits of their labor.

Because ideas go forth in a subtile way, and are widely diffused, is no reason for regarding them as "free as the light," to be appropriated by anybody without paying their originators. If they are real and tangible enough to steal, they are capable of protection as property. It is in no sense a question of the form or quality of the things produced, for these are but accidents. If an author is to be robbed because his property is in an ethereal shape, why not rob the milkman because his property is in a liquid shape? Whether a man devote his powers to the elaboration of thought or the elaboration of matter is perfectly immaterial so far as concerns the question of his property right in the thing produced.

But we may go further and ask what property can have so sacred a right of recognition as that which is the product of man's highest faculties? The creations and constructions of the brain, as they have a far higher value to the world than the mere products of material manipulation, have also a more transcendent and inviolable claim to the protection of law. The hand is but the servant of the intellect. All knowledge, art, science, literature, discovery, invention, all that redeems man from barbarism and creates civilization, are but results of brain-exertion; and are we to discredit this noblest form of effort and outlaw the men whose lives have been consumed by it, while all the guards of legislation are thrown round the grosser forms of manipulative industry?

But it will be said all this is clear enough—why multiply wearisome commonplaces? Most true, and if our practice conformed to these professions, nothing would need to be said. But our practice is a direct contradiction to admitted and self-evident justice, and this is a state of things that can not be let alone. We affirm an author's right in his work, and then we proceed systematically to rob him of it. We are not only thieves, but thieves proclaiming in open day that we know ourselves to be so. To be sure, it is foreign authors whom we rob, but this does not affect the case, as the rights of private property are coextensive with civilization. It will hardly do to object to a "foreigner" when we appreciate his work so highly as to covet it and take it from him wrongfully. His case against us is clear enough. He says: "I have produced my book at much expense and with hard labor. I have created property in it; you want it, and in taking it you attest its value; you appropriate it to enrich yourselves without giving me a just equivalent; you steal it, and your Government protects you in it as if it were an innocent act." The logic is short and decisive, and it leaves this country in no very enviable position in the community of nations. Claiming to be civilized, enlightened, and even Christian, we practice an ethical code in this matter not higher than the standard of savages. Were our Government founded in usurpation and injustice, as we assert the European Governments to be, there would be a kind of consistency in maintaining this admitted wrong; but, while the monarchical countries have cleared themselves of all complicity in it, it is reserved for the people who boast of the "best government on earth," and who fill the world with their boasts about "human rights," to maintain an organized system of literary brigandage in which private rights are unscrupulously violated, and the highest products of man's exertion are the, objects of indiscriminate plunder. It is a case, moreover, in which meanness is added to dishonesty. We take from its owner that which he is powerless to protect. We steal that which is confided to the public honor, and, as if this were not enough, we add hypocrisy to meanness by putting forth palavering pretexts for our action. There are