If Congress be really desirous of doing something for the benefit of American authors, it would come nearer the mark, if it directed its attention to the establishment on equitable grounds of some system of International Copyright.  A well-considered enactment to this end would, we are convinced, be quite as advantageous to the manufacturers as to the producers of books.  We believe that a majority of the large publishing houses of the country have been gradually convinced of the inconveniences of the present want of system.  Many of them have found it profitable to enter into an agreement with popular English authors for the payment of copyright, and works thus reprinted cost the buyer no more than under the privateering policy.  But without some definite establishment of legal rights and remedies, the publisher is at the mercy of a dishonorable, sometimes of a vindictive competition, and must run the risk of having the market flooded within a week with a cheaper and inferior edition, reprinted from the sheets of his own which had been honorably paid for.  We do not pretend to argue the question of literary property, the principle of it being admitted in the fact that we have any copyright-laws at all.  Our wish is to show, that, in the present absence of settled law, the honest publisher is subjected to risks from the resultant evils of which the whole reading community suffers.  The publisher, to protect himself, is forced to make his reprint as cheaply as possible, and to hurry it through the press with the disregard of accuracy inseparable from hasty publication,—­while the reader is put in possession of a book destructive of eyesight, crowded with blunders, and unsightly in appearance.  Maps and plates are omitted, or copied so carelessly as to be worse than useless; and whoever needs the book for study or reference must still buy the original edition, made more costly because imported in single copies, and because taxed for the protection of a state of things discreditable in every way, and not only so, but hostile to the true interests of both publishers and public.

We do not claim any protection of American authorship from foreign competition, but we cannot but think it unfair that British authorship should be protected (as it now practically is) at the cost of our own, and for the benefit of such publishers as are willing to convey an English book without paying for it.  The reprint of a second-rate work by an English author has not only the advantage of a stolen cheapness over a first-rate one on the same subject by an American, but may even be the means of suppressing it altogether.  The intellectual position of an American is so favorable for the treatment of European history as to overbalance in some instances the disadvantages arising from want of access to original documents; yet an American author whose work was yet in manuscript could not possibly compete with an English rival, even of far inferior ability, who had already published.  If, within