Our people are here assured that Russia, Sweden, and other countries are ready to unite with them in recognizing the “rights” now claimed.  So, too, it may be well believed, would it be with China, Japan, Bokhara, and the Sandwich Islands.  Of what use, however, would be such an union?  Would it increase the facilities for transplanting the ideas of American authors?  Are not the obstacles to such transplantation already sufficiently great, and is it desirable that they should be at all increased?  Germany has already tried the experiment, but whether or not, when the time shall come, the existing treaties will be renewed, is very doubtful.  Where she now pays dollars, she probably receives cents.  Discussion of the question there has led to the translation and republication of the letters here now republished, and the views therein expressed have received the public approbation of men whose opinions are entitled to the highest consideration.  What has recently been done in that country in reference to domestic copyright, and what has been the effect, are well exhibited in an article from an English journal just now received, a part of which, American moneys having been substituted for German ones, is here given, as follows: 

“We have so long enjoyed the advantage of unrestricted competition in the production of the works of the best English writers of the past, that we can hardly realize what our position would have been had the right to produce Shakespeare, or Milton, or Goldsmith, or any of our great classic writers, been monopolized by any one publishing-house,—­certainly we should never have seen a shilling Shakespeare, or a half-crown Milton; and Shakespeare, instead of being, as he is,’ familiar in our mouths as household words,’ would have been known but to the scholar and the student.  We are far from condemning an enlightened system of copyright, and have not a word to say in favor of unreasoning competition; but we do think that publishers and authors often lose sight of their own interest in adhering to a system of high prices and restricted sale.  Tennyson’s works supply us with a case in point—­here, to possess a set of Tennyson’s poems, a reader must pay something like 38_s_. or 40_s_.—­in Boston you may buy a magnificent edition of all his works in two volumes for something like 15_s_., and a small edition for some four or five shillings.  The result is the purchasers in England are numbered by hundreds, in America by thousands.  In Germany we have almost a parallel case.  There the works of the great German poets, of Schiller, of Goethe, of Jean Paul, of Wieland, and of Herder, are at the present time ’under the protecting privileges of the most illustrious German Confederation,’ and, by special privilege, the exclusive property of the Stuttgart publishing firm of J. G. Cotta.  On the forthcoming 9th of November this monopoly will cease, and all the works of the above-mentioned poets will be open to the speculation of German publishers generally.