that we had given English authors a monopoly in our market to enable our own to secure a monopoly in that of England?  Would not the sufferers next inquire by what process this had been accomplished, seeing that the direct representatives of the people had always been so firmly opposed to it; and would not the answer be that the literary men of the two countries had formed a combination for the purpose of taxing the people of both; and that when they had failed to accomplish their object by means of legislation, they had induced the Executive to interpose and make a law in their favor, in defiance of the well-known will of the House of Representatives?  Under such circumstances, would it be extraordinary if we should, within three years from the ratification of the treaty, see the commencement of an agitation for a change in the copyright system?  It seems to me that it would not.

The time for the arrival of this agitation would probably be hastened by an extension of the system of centralization that would next be claimed; for the present measure can be regarded as little more than the entering wedge for others.  France and England profit enormously by setting the fashions for the world.  New patterns and new articles are invented that sell in the first season for treble or quadruple the price at which they are gladly supplied in the second; and it is by aid of the perpetual changes bf fashion that foreigners so much control our markets.  Recently, our manufacturers have been enabled to reproduce many new articles in very short time, and this has tended greatly to reduce the profits of foreigners, who are of course dissatisfied.  Copyrights are now granted in both those countries for new patterns, new forms of clothing, &c. &c., and our next step will be towards the arrangement of a treaty for, securing to the inventor of a print, or a new fashion of paletot, the monopoly of its production in our markets; and when the claim for this shall be made, it will be found to stand on precisely the same ground with that now made in behalf of the producers of books, and must be granted.  The Frenchman will then have the exclusive right of supplying us with new mousselines de laine, and the Englishman with new carpets and new forms of earthenware; and we shall be told that that is the true mode of developing manufacturing and artistic skill among ourselves.  How much farther the system may be carried it is difficult to tell, for, when we shall once have established the system of regulating foreign and domestic trade by treaty, the House of Representatives will scarcely be troubled with much discussion of such affairs.  Extremes generally meet, and it will be extraordinary, if progress in that direction shall not be followed by progress in the other, until our authors shall, at length, become perfectly satisfied of the accuracy of Mr. Macaulay, when he told the British authors, then claiming an extension of their monopoly to sixty years, that “the wholesome copyright” already existing would “share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright” they desired to create.[1] They could scarcely do better than study his speech at length.  At present, they are ill-advised, and their best friends will be those senators who, like Mr. Macaulay, shall oppose their literary countrymen.