the last few years, a tolerably popular history of France had been published in England, and cheaply reprinted here, (as it surely would have been,) we doubt whether Mr. Godwin would have undertaken his laborious and elaborate work,—­or, if he had, whether he would have readily found a bookseller bold enough to pay an adequate price for the copyright.  And it is to be remembered that an American publisher gives this preference to an English over an American book simply because he can get it for nothing, by defrauding its author of the just reward of his industry or genius.  That an author loses his equitable claim to copyright for the simple reason that by publication he has put himself in our power is an argument fit to be used only by one who would make use of a private letter that had accidentally come into his possession to the damage of the writer.

The necessity of some kind of equitable arrangement was so strongly felt by American publishers that a kind of unwritten law gradually established itself among them.  It was tacitly understood, that, when a publisher had paid an English author for advance sheets, no rival American edition should be published.  But it already appears too plainly that an arrangement with no guaranty but a private sense of honor is liable to constant infringement for the gratification of personal enmity, or in the hope of immediate profit.  The rewards of uprightness and honorable dealing are slow in coming, while those of unscrupulous greed are immediate, even though dirty.  Under existing circumstances, free-trade and fair-play exist only in appearance:  for the extraordinary claim has been set up, that an American bookseller has an exclusive right to all the future works of an English author any one of whose former productions he has reprinted, whether with or without paying for it; so that, however willing another publisher may be to give the author a fair price for his book, or however desirous the latter may be to conclude such a bargain, it is practically impossible, so long as privateering is tolerated in the trade.

We have said nothing of the advantages which would accrue to our own authors from a definite settlement of the question of international copyright between England and America.  How great these would be is plain from the fact that the editions of American books republished in England are already numbered by thousands.  With the growth of the English Colonies the value to an American author of an English copyright is daily increasing.  Indeed, it is a matter of consideration for our publishers, whether Canada may not before long retaliate upon them, and by cheaper reprints become as troublesome to them as Belgium once was to France.