thrice the sum we receive for transit duty, on the simple condition that we abolished the monopoly of transportation; and it would gain far more largely by doing the same with foreign authors.  If justice does really call upon us to pay them, our true course would be to do it directly from the Treasury, placing, if necessary, a million of dollars annually at the disposal of the British government, upon the simple condition that it releases us from all claim to the monopoly of publication.  Such a release would be cheap, even at two millions; enough to give $4,000 a year to five hundred persons, and that number would certainly include all who can even fancy us under any obligation to them.  My own impression is, that no such payment is required by justice, either as regards our own authors or foreign ones.  Of the former, all can be and are well paid, who can produce books that the public are willing to read, and no law that could be made would secure payment to those who cannot.  Their monopoly extends over a smaller number of persons than does the English one; and if the more than thirty millions of people who are subject to the latter cannot support their few writers, the cause of difficulty is to be found at home, and there must the remedy be applied.  Nevertheless, by adopting the course suggested, we should certainly free ourselves from any necessity for choosing between the payment of many millions annually to authors and the men who stand between them and the public, on the one hand, and of dispensing largely with the purchase of books, on the other.  If the nation must pay, the fewer persons through whose hands the money passes the smaller will be the cost to it, and the greater the gain to authors.

The ratification of the treaty would impose upon us a very large amount of taxation that must inevitably be paid either in money or in abstinence from intellectual nourishment; and our authors should be able to satisfy themselves that the advantage to them would bear some proportion to the loss inflicted upon others.  Would it do so?  I think not.  On the contrary, they would find their condition greatly impaired.  All publishers prefer copyright books, because, having a monopoly, they can charge monopoly profits.  To obtain a copyright, they constantly pay considerable sums at home for editorship of foreign books; but from the moment that this treaty shall take effect, the necessity for doing this will cease, and thus will our literary men be deprived of one considerable source of profit.  Again, literary labor in England is cheap, because of want of demand; but international copyright, by opening to it our vast market, will quicken the demand, and many more books will be produced, the authors of all of which will be competitors with our own, who will then possess no advantages over them.  The rates of American authors will then fall precisely as those of the British ones will rise; and this result will be produced as certainly as the water in the upper chamber of a canal lock will fall as that in the lower one is made to rise.  On one side of the Atlantic literary labor is well paid, and on the other it is badly paid.  International copyright will establish a level; and how much reason our authors have to desire that it shall be established, I leave it for them to determine.