No question of tariff protection is here involved.  What duty shall be imposed upon foreign products or foreign manufactures is a question of political economy.  The wrong against which authors should protest is in annexing to their terms of ownership of their property a protective tariff revision.  For, be it observed, this is a subject of abstract justice, moral right, and it matters nothing whether the author be American, English, German, French, Hindoo, or Chinese,—­and it is very certain that when America shall enact a simple, just, copyright law, giving to every human being the same protection of law to his property in his mental products as in the work of his hands, every civilized nation on earth will follow the noble example.

As it now stands, authors who annually produce the raw material for manufacturing purposes to an amount in value of millions, supporting vast populations of people, authors whose mental produce rivals and exceeds in commercial value many of the great staple products of our fields, are the only producers who have no distinct property in their products, who are not protected in holding on to the feeble tenure the law gives them, and whose quasi-property in their works, flimsy as it is, is limited to a few years, and cannot with certainty be handed down to their children.  It will be said, it is said, that it is impossible for the author to obtain an acknowledgment of absolute right of property in his brain work.  In our civilization we have not yet arrived at this state of justice.  It may be so.  Indeed some authors have declared that this justice would be against public policy.  I trust they are sustained by the lofty thought that in this view they are rising above the petty realm of literature into the broad field of statesmanship.

But I think there will be a general agreement that in the needed revisal of our local copyright law we can attain some measure of justice.  Some of the most obvious hardships can be removed.  There is no reason why an author should pay for the privilege of a long life by the loss of his copyrights, and that his old age should be embittered by poverty because he cannot have the results of the labor of his vigorous years.  There is no reason why if he dies young he should leave those dependent on him without support, for the public has really no more right to appropriate his book than it would have to take his house from his widow and children.  His income at best is small after he has divided with the publishers.

No, there can certainly be no valid argument against extending the copyright of the author to his own lifetime, with the addition of forty or fifty years for the benefit of his heirs.  I will not leave this portion of the topic without saying that a perfectly harmonious relation between authors and publishers is most earnestly to be desired, nor without the frank acknowledgment that, in literary tradition and in the present experience, many of the most noble friendships and the most generous and helpful relations have subsisted, as they ought always to subsist, between the producers and the distributors of literature, especially when the publisher has a love for literature, and the author is a reasonable being and takes pains to inform himself about the publishing business.