been growing more and more uneasy all these last months—­steadily along with the implacable increase in your census—­and I will not conceal from you that more than once they have touched upon the expediency of a change in the Professorship of Moral Culture.  The coarsely sarcastic editorial in yesterday’s Alta, headed Give the Moral Acrobat a Rest—­has brought things to a crisis, and I am charged with the unpleasant duty of receiving your resignation.”

I know you only mean me a kindness, dear 1365, but it is a most deadly mistake.  Please do not name your Injun for me.  Truly Yours.

Mailed Answer: 

         &nb
sp;                              NewYork, Sept. 8. 1887. 
Dear sir,—­Necessarily I cannot assent to so strange a proposition.  And I think it but fair to warn you that if you put the piece on the stage, you must take the legal consequences. 
                         Yours respectfully,
                                   S. L. Clemens.

Before the days of international copyright no American author’s books were pirated more freely by Canadian publishers than those of Mark Twain.  It was always a sore point with him that these books, cheaply printed, found their way into the United States, and were sold in competition with his better editions.  The law on the subject seemed to be rather hazy, and its various interpretations exasperating.  In the next unmailed letter Mark Twain relieves himself to a misguided official.  The letter is worth reading today, if for no other reason, to show the absurdity of copyright conditions which prevailed at that time.

          Unmailed Letter to H. C. Christiancy, on book Piracy: 

Hartford, Dec. 18, ’87. 
H. C. Christiancy, ESQ.

Dear sir,—­As I understand it, the position of the U. S. Government is this:  If a person be captured on the border with counterfeit bonds in his hands—­bonds of the N. Y. Central Railway, for instance—­the procedure in his case shall be as follows: 

1.  If the N. Y. C. have not previously filed in the several police offices along the border, proof of ownership of the originals of the bonds, the government officials must collect a duty on the counterfeits, and then let them go ahead and circulate in this country.

2.  But if there is proof already on file, then the N. Y. C. may pay the duty and take the counterfeits.

But in no case will the United States consent to go without its share of the swag.  It is delicious.  The biggest and proudest government on earth turned sneak-thief; collecting pennies on stolen property, and pocketing them with a greasy and libidinous leer; going into partnership with foreign thieves to rob its own children; and when the child escapes the foreigner, descending to the abysmal baseness of hanging on and robbing the infant all alone by itself!  Dear sir, this is not any more respectable than for a father to collect toll on the forced prostitution of his own daughter; in fact it is the same thing.  Upon these terms, what is a U. S. custom house but a “fence?” That is all it is:  a legalized trader in stolen goods.