country, who travel in steam-vessels, have given to the family of Fulton no pecuniary reward, while her writers have uniformly endeavored to deprive him of the reputation which constituted almost the sole inheritance of his family.  The whole people of Europe are profiting by the discovery of chloroform; but who inquires what has become of the family of its unfortunate discoverer?  Nobody!  The people of England profit largely by the discoveries of Fourcroy, Berzelius, and many other of the continental philosophers; but do those who manufacture cheap cloth, or those who wear it, contribute to the support of the families of those philosophers?  Did they contribute to their support while alive?  Certainly not.  To do so would have been in opposition to the idea that the real contributors to knowledge should be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the gentlemen who dress up their facts and ideas in an attractive form and place them before the world in the form of cloth or books.

We are largely indebted to the labors of literary men, and they should be well paid, but their claims to pecuniary reward have been much exaggerated, because they have held the pen and have had always a high degree of belief in their own deserts.  Their right in the books they publish is precisely similar to, and no greater than, that of the man who culls the flowers and arranges the bouquets; and, when that is provided for, their books are entitled to become common property.  English authors are already secured in a monopoly for forty-two years among a body of people so large that a contribution of a shilling a head would enable each and all of them to live in luxury; and if British policy prevents their countrymen from paying them, it is to the British Parliament they should look for redress, and not to our Executive.  When they shall awaken to the fact that “cheap labor” with the spade, the plough, and the loom, brings with it necessarily “cheap labor” with the pen, they will become opponents, and cease to be advocates of the system under which they suffer.  All that, in the mean time, we can say to them is, that we protect our own authors by giving them a monopoly of our own immense and rapidly growing market, and that if they choose to come and live among us we will grant them the same protection.  We may now look to the condition of our own literary men.

LETTER V.

Our system is based upon an idea directly the reverse of the one on which rests the English system—­that of decentralization; and we may now study its effects as shown in the development of literary tendencies and in the reward of authors.