under our unjust statutes, and if it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out the aggressors and punish them, as it would seek out and punish the trespassers upon any other kind of property; it leaves the aggrieved owner to bring suit against them, and recover damages, if he can.  This may be right enough in itself; but I think, then, that all property should be defended by civil suit, and should become public after forty-two years of private tenure.  The Constitution guarantees us all equality before the law, but the law-makers seem to have forgotten this in the case of our literary industry.  So long as this remains the case, we cannot expect the best business talent to go into literature, and the man of letters must keep his present low grade among business men.

As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standing at all.  I may say that it is only since the Civil War that literature has become a business with us.  Before that time we had authors, and very good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but I do not remember any of them who lived by literature except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and we all know how he lived; it was largely upon loans.  They were either men of fortune, or they were editors or professors, with salaries or incomes apart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped out with public offices; one need not go over their names or classify them.  Some of them must have made money by their books, but I question whether any one could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his books brought him.  No one could do that now, unless he wrote a book that we could not recognize as a work of literature.  But many authors live now, and live prettily enough, by the sale of the serial publication of their writings to the magazines.  They do not live so nicely as successful tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other professions when they begin to make themselves names; the high state of brokers, bankers, railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of the case, beyond their fondest dreams of pecuniary affluence and social splendor.  Perhaps they do not want the chief seats in the synagogue; it is certain they do not get them.  Still, they do very fairly well, as things go; and several have incomes that would seem riches to the great mass of worthy Americans who work with their hands for a living—­when they can get the work.  Their incomes are mainly from serial publication in the different magazines; and the prosperity of the magazines has given a whole class existence which, as a class, was wholly unknown among us before the Civil War.  It is not only the famous or fully recognized authors who live in this way, but the much larger number of clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the editors, and who may never make themselves a public, but who do well a kind of acceptable work.  These are the sort who do not get reprinted from the periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get reprinted, and