passing through the Crystal Palace.  For this service you are to be paid; but to enable you to receive payment you need the aid of the legislator, as the common law grants no more copyright for the form in which ideas are expressed than for the ideas themselves.  In granting this aid he is required to see that, while he secures that you have justice, he does no injustice to the men who produce the raw material of your books, nor to the community whose common property it is.  In granting it, he is bound to use his efforts to attain the knowledge needed for enabling him to do justice to all parties, and not to you alone.  The laws which elsewhere govern the distribution of the proceeds of labor, must apply in your case with equal force.  Looking at them, we see that, with the growth of population and of wealth, there is everywhere a tendency to diminution in the proportion of the product that is allowed to the men who stand between the producer and the consumer.  In new settlements, trade is small and the shopkeeper requires large profits to enable him to live; and, while the consumer pays a high price, the producer is compelled to be content with a low one.  In new settlements, the miller takes a large toll for the conversion of corn into flour, and the spinner and weaver take a large portion of the wool as their reward for converting the balance into cloth.  Nevertheless, the shopkeeper, the miller, the spinner, and the weaver are poor, because trade is small.  As wealth and population grow, we find the shopkeeper gradually reducing his charge, until from fifty it falls to five per cent.; the miller reducing his, until he finds that he can afford to give all the flour that is yielded by the corn, retaining for himself the bran alone; and the spinner and weaver contenting himself with a constantly diminishing proportion of the wool; and now it is that we find shopkeepers, millers, and manufacturers grow rich, while consumers are cheaply supplied because of the vast increase of trade.  In your case, however, the course of proceeding has been altogether different.  Half a century since, when our people were but four millions in number, and were poor and scattered, gentlemen like you were secured in the monopoly of their works for fourteen years, with a power of renewal for a similar term.  Twenty years since, when the population had almost tripled, and their wealth had sixfold increased, and when the facilities of distribution had vastly grown, the term was fixed at twenty-eight years, with renewal to widow or children for fourteen years more.  At the present moment, you are secured in a monopoly for forty-two years, among a population of twenty-six millions of people, certain, at the close of twenty years more, to be fifty millions and likely, at the close of another half century, to be a hundred millions, and with facilities, for the disposal of your products, growing at a rate unequaled in the world.  With this vast increase of market, and increase of power