stringent rules, established a “courtesy” copyright, the effect of which exhibits itself in the fact, that the prices of reprinted books are now rapidly approaching those of domestic production.  Further advances in that direction might, however, prove dangerous; “courtesy” rules not, as we are here informed, being readily susceptible of enforcement.  A salutary fear of interlopers still restrains those “great and wealthy houses,” at heavy annual cost to themselves, and with great saving to consumers of their products.  That this may all be changed; that they may build up fortunes with still increased rapidity; that they may, to a still greater extent, monopolize the business of publication; and, that the people may be taxed to that effect; all that is now needed is, that Congress shall pass a very simple law by means of which a few men in Eastern cities shall be enabled to monopolize the business of republication, secure from either Eastern or Western competition.  That done, readers will be likely to see a state of things similar to that now exhibited at Chicago, where railroad companies that have secured to themselves all the exits and entrances of the city, are, as we are told, at this moment engaged in organizing a combination that shall have the effect of dividing in fair proportion among the wolves the numerous flocks of sheep.

On all former occasions Northern advocates of literary monopolies assured us that it was in that direction, and in that alone, we were to look for the cheapening of books.  Now, nothing of this sort is at all pretended.  On the contrary, we are here told of the extreme impropriety of a system which makes it necessary for a New England essayist to accept a single dollar for a volume that under other circumstances would sell for half a guinea; of the wrong to such essayists that results from the issue of cheap “periodicals made up of selections from the reviews and magazines of Europe;” of the “abominable extravagance of buying a great and good novel in a perishable form for a few cents;” of the increased accessibility of books by the “masses of the people” that must result from increasing prices; and of the greatly increased facility with which circulating libraries may be formed whensoever the “great and wealthy houses” shall have been given power to claim from each and every reader of Dickens’s novels, as their share of the monopoly profits, thrice as much as he now pays for the book itself!  This, however, is only history repeating itself with a little change of place, the argument of to-day, coming from the North, being an almost exact repetition of that which, twenty years since, came from the South—­from the mouths of men who rejoiced in the fact that no newspapers were published in their districts, and who well knew that the way towards preventing the dissemination of knowledge lay in the direction of granting the monopoly privileges that had been asked.  The anti-slavery men of the present thus repeat the argument of the pro-slavery men of the past, extremes being thus brought close together.