Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/452

434 or consent. I learn accidentally that a volume has appeared in New York, which consists of three recent articles of yours in the Nineteenth Century, printed alternately with three recent articles of mine, with an introduction, notes, and appendix. This re-issue of my articles was made without the knowledge of myself, or of the proprietor of the Nineteenth Century, and he tells me that it is a case of piracy.

"You now avow (in your letter to me of yesterday) that the volume was issued by your American publishers, and was edited by your friend Professor Youmans, after consultation with you, with your consent and assistance. You also avow that you furnished the editor with controversial comments on my articles, and requested him to append them in his own way—that is to say, you have abetted a clandestine reprint of three articles of mine, interpolated with notes supplied by yourself. I regard this, not only as an act of literary piracy, but as a new and most unworthy form of literary piracy. May I ask if it is proposed to hand you the profits of a book of which I am (in part) the author, or are these to be retained by your American publishers and friend?

"To justify this act you now write that you expected republication in America by my friends. This expectation rests, I can assure you, on a pure invention. No friend of mine, nor any person whatever in America or in England, has ever suggested to me the republication of my articles, nor have I ever heard or thought of such a project. You quote to me, as your authority, a letter from Professor Youmans, who simply says there is danger of its being done by others, and he adds that I am coming to lecture in America. Again, this is a pure invention. I have never thought of lecturing in America, or of going there, nor has any one on either side of the Atlantic suggested to me to do so. Those who 'convey' my writings will as readily invent my intentions. Inquiry would have shown that neither I nor my friends had any intention of reprinting any articles—much less yours. And I fail to see how an unverified report that they might be reprinted, coupled with an unverified report that I was going to lecture in America, could justify you in promoting and assisting in the unauthorized issue and sale of writings of mine.

"This is not a simple case of clandestine reprint. Those of us who do not take elaborate precautions are exposed to have what they write appearing in unauthorized American editions. But it does surprise me that an English writer should connive at this treatment of another English writer, with whom he had been carrying on an honorable discussion. It is, I think, something new, even in American piracy, to re-issue an author's writings behind his back, and sell them interlarded with hostile comment. Reprints, even while they plunder us, spare us the sight of our sentences broken on the same page with such amenities as 'he complacently assumes,' 'loose and misleading statements,' etc. You avow, in your letter of yesterday, that you supplied these comments to my articles; and if internal evidence did not show them to be yours, by your offer to me to republish them now in England, you treat them as yours. I know no instance of such a practice. It is as if I were piratically to reprint your 'Data of Ethics,' freely interspersed with a running commentary on your practice of ethics, and were to justify my act on the ground that I had had a controversy with you, and that I had heard your friends were about to reprint it.

"There is one minor point which serves to show the kind of publication in which you have chosen to take part. My articles in this volume are followed by a cutting from a newspaper account of what the editor calls 'The Little Bethel of the Comtists.' As the volume bears as its subtitle the words, 'A