The laws of England and America do take it away, do select but one class, the people who create the literature of the land.  They always talk handsomely about the literature of the land, always what a fine, great, monumental thing a great literature is, and in the midst of their enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to discourage it.

I know we must have a limit, but forty-two years is too much of a limit.  I am quite unable to guess why there should be a limit at all to the possession of the product of a man’s labor.  There is no limit to real estate.

Doctor Bale has suggested that a man might just as well, after discovering a coal-mine and working it forty-two years, have the Government step in and take it away.

What is the excuse?  It is that the author who produced that book has had the profit of it long enough, and therefore the Government takes a profit which does not belong to it and generously gives it to the 88,000,000 of people.  But it doesn’t do anything of the kind.  It merely takes the author’s property, takes his children’s bread, and gives the publisher double profit.  He goes on publishing the book and as many of his confederates as choose to go into the conspiracy do so, and they rear families in affluence.

And they continue the enjoyment of those ill-gotten gains generation after generation forever, for they never die.  In a few weeks or months or years I shall be out of it, I hope under a monument.  I hope I shall not be entirely forgotten, and I shall subscribe to the monument myself.  But I shall not be caring what happens if there are fifty years left of my copyright.  My copyright produces annually a good deal more than I can use, but my children can use it.  I can get along; I know a lot of trades.  But that goes to my daughters, who can’t get along as well as I can because I have carefully raised them as young ladies, who don’t know anything and can’t do anything.  I hope Congress will extend to them the charity which they have failed to get from me.

Why, if a man who is not even mad, but only strenuous—­strenuous about race-suicide—­should come to me and try to get me to use my large political and ecclesiastical influence to get a bill passed by this Congress limiting families to twenty-two children by one mother, I should try to calm him down.  I should reason with him.  I should say to him, “Leave it alone.  Leave it alone and it will take care of itself.  Only one couple a year in the United States can reach that limit.  If they have reached that limit let them go right on.  Let them have all the liberty they want.  In restricting that family to twenty-two children you are merely conferring discomfort and unhappiness on one family per year in a nation of 88,000,000, which is not worth while.”

It is the very same with copyright.  One author per year produces a book which can outlive the forty-two-year limit; that’s all.  This nation can’t produce two authors a year that can do it; the thing is demonstrably impossible.  All that the limited copyright can do is to take the bread out of the mouths of the children of that one author per year.