The most active and earnest of all the advocates of literary rights was, two years since, if the writer’s memory correctly serves him, the most thorough and determined of all our journalists in insisting on the prompt dismissal of thousands and tens of thousands of men who, at their country’s call, had abandoned the pursuits and profits of civil life.  Did he, however, ever propose that they should be allowed any extra pay on which to live, and by means of which to support their wives and children, in the interval between discharge from military service and re-establishment in their old pursuits?  Nothing of the kind is now recollected.  Would he now advocate the enactment of a law by means of which the widow and children of a major-general who had fallen on the field should, so far as pay was concerned, be placed on a level with an ordinary police officer?  He might, but that he would do so could not with any certainty be affirmed.  She and they would, nevertheless, seem to have claims on the consideration of American men and women fully equal to those of the authoress of “Lady Audley’s Secret,” already, as she is understood to be, in the annual receipt from this country of more than thrice the amount of the widow’s pension, in addition to tens of thousands at home.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The London correspondent of Scribner and Co.’s “Book Buyer” says that Miss Braddon’s first publisher, Mr. Tinsley (who died suddenly last year), called the elegant villa he built for himself at Putney “Audley House,” in grateful remembrance of the “Lady” to whose “Secret” he was indebted for fortune; and Miss Braddon herself, through her man of business, has recently purchased a stately mansion of Queen Anne’s time, “Litchfield House,” at Richmond.]

It is, however, as we are gravely told, but ten per cent. that she asks, and who could or should object to payment of such a pittance?  Not many, perhaps, if unaccompanied by monopoly privleges that would multiply the ten by ten and make it an hundred! Alone, the cost to our readers might not now exceed an annual million.  Let Congress then pass an act appropriating that sum to be distributed among foreign authors whose works had been, or might be republished here. That should have the writer’s vote, but he objects, and will continue to object, to any legislative action that shall tend towards giving to already “great and wealthy” publishing houses the nine millions that they certainly will charge for collecting the single one that is to go abroad.

“Great and wealthy” as they are here said to be, and as they certainly are, we are assured that even they have serious troubles, against which they greatly need to be protected.  In common with many heretofore competing railroad companies they have found that, however competition among themselves might benefit the public, it would tend rather to their own injury, and therefore have they, by means of most