And this nasty law, this filthy law, this unspeakable law calls itself a “regulation for the protection of owners of copyright!” Can sarcasm go further than that?  In what way does it protect them?  Inspiration itself could not furnish a rational answer to that question.  Whom does it protect, then?  Nobody, as far as I can see, but the foreign thief —­sometimes—­and his fellow-footpad the U. S. government, all the time.  What could the Central Company do with the counterfeit bonds after it had bought them of the star spangled banner Master-thief?  Sell them at a dollar apiece and fetch down the market for the genuine hundred-dollar bond?  What could I do with that 20-cent copy of “Roughing It” which the United States has collared on the border and is waiting to release to me for cash in case I am willing to come down to its moral level and help rob myself?  Sell it at ten or fifteen cents—­duty added—­and destroy the market for the original $3,50 book?  Who ever did invent that law?  I would like to know the name of that immortal jackass.

Dear sir, I appreciate your courtesy in stretching your authority in the desire to do me a kindness, and I sincerely thank you for it.  But I have no use for that book; and if I were even starving for it I would not pay duty on in either to get it or suppress it.  No doubt there are ways in which I might consent to go into partnership with thieves and fences, but this is not one of them.  This one revolts the remains of my self-respect; turns my stomach.  I think I could companion with a highwayman who carried a shot-gun and took many risks; yes, I think I should like that if I were younger; but to go in with a big rich government that robs paupers, and the widows and orphans of paupers and takes no risk—­why the thought just gags me.

Oh, no, I shall never pay any duties on pirated books of mine.  I am much too respectable for that—­yet awhile.  But here—­one thing that grovels me is this:  as far as I can discover—­while freely granting that the U. S. copyright laws are far and away the most idiotic that exist anywhere on the face of the earth—­they don’t authorize the government to admit pirated books into this country, toll or no toll.  And so I think that that regulation is the invention of one of those people—­as a rule, early stricken of God, intellectually—­the departmental interpreters of the laws, in Washington.  They can always be depended on to take any reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it.  They can be depended on, every time, to defeat a good law, and make it inoperative—­yes, and utterly grotesque, too, mere matter for laughter and derision.  Take some of the decisions of the Post-office Department, for instance—­though I do not mean to suggest that that asylum is any worse than the others for the breeding and nourishing of incredible lunatics—­I merely instance it because it happens to be the first to come into my mind.  Take that case of a few