of his books will find in them no contribution to positive knowledge.  The works of men who make contributions of that kind are necessarily controversial and distasteful to the reader; for which reason they find few readers, and never pay their authors.  Turn now to our own authors, Prescott and Bancroft, who have furnished us with historical works of so great excellence, and you will find a state of things precisely similar.  They have taken a large quantity of materials out of the common stock, in which you, and I, and all of us have an interest; and those materials they have so reclothed as to render them attractive of purchasers; but this is all they have done.  Look to Mr. Webster’s works, and you will find it the same.  He was a great reader.  He studied the Constitution carefully, with a view to understand what were the views of its authors, and those views he reproduced in different and more attractive clothing, and there his work ended.  He never pretended, as I think, to furnish the world with any new ideas; and if he had done so, he could have claimed no property in them.  Few now read the heavy volumes containing the speeches of Fox and Pitt.  They did nothing but reproduce ideas that were common property, and in such clothing as answered the purposes of the moment.  Sir Robert Peel did the same.  The world would now be just as wise had he never lived, for he made no contribution to the general stock of knowledge.  The great work of Chancellor Kent is, to use the words of Judge Story, “but a new combination and arrangement of old materials, in which the skill and judgment of the author in the selection and exposition, and accurate use of those materials, constitute the basis of his reputation, as well as of his copyright.”  The world at large is the owner of all the facts that have been collected, and of all the ideas that have been deduced from them, and its right in them is precisely the same that the planter has in the bale of cotton that has been raised on his plantation; and the course of proceeding of both has, thus far, been precisely similar; whence I am induced to infer that, in both cases, right has been done.  When the planter hands his cotton to the spinner and the weaver, he does not say, “Take this and convert it into cloth, and keep the cloth;” but he does say, “Spin and weave this cotton, and for so doing you shall have such interest in the cloth as will give you a fair compensation for your labor and skill, but, when that shall have been paid, the cloth will be mine.”  This latter is precisely what society, the owner of facts and ideas, says to the author:  “Take these raw materials that have been collected, put them together, and clothe them after your own fashion, and for a given time we will agree that nobody else shall present them in the same dress.  During that time you may exhibit them for your own profit, but at the end of that period the clothing will become common property, as the body now is.  It is to the contributions of your predecessors to our common stock that you are indebted for the power to make your book, and we require you, in your turn, to contribute towards the augmentation of the stock that is to be used by your successors.”  This is justice, and to grant more than this would be injustice.