for literature, is it not certain that it must continue to grow with increased rapidity?  Assuredly it is; and yet it is that vast market that our authors desire to barter for one in which Hood was permitted almost to starve, in which Leigh Hunt, Lady Morgan, Miss Mitford, Tennyson, and Sir Francis Head even now submit to the degradation of receiving the public charity to the extent of a hundred pounds a year!  The law as it now exists, invites foreign authors to come and live among us, and participate in our advantages.  The treaty offers to tax ourselves for the purpose of offering them a bounty upon staying at home and increasing their numbers and their competition with the well-paid literary labor of this country.  Were Belgrave Square to make a treaty with Grub Street, providing that each should have a plate at the tables of the other, the population of the latter would probably grow as rapidly as the dinners of the former would decline in quality, and it might be well for our authors to reflect if such might not be the result of the treaty now proposed.

Its confirmation is, as I understand, urged on some senators on the ground that consistency requires it.  Being in favor of protection elsewhere, they are told that it would be inconsistent to refuse it here.  In reply to this, it might fairly be retorted that nearly all the supporters of international copyright are advocates of the system called, in England, Free Trade; and that it is quite inconsistent in them to advocate protection here.  To do this would however be as unnecessary as it would be unphilosophical.  Both are perfectly consistent.  Protection to the farmer and planter in their efforts to draw the artisan to their side, looks to carrying out the doctrine of decentralization by the annihilation of the monopoly of manufactures established in Britain; and our present copyright system looks to the decentralization of literature by offering to all who shall come and live among us the same perfect protection that we give to our own authors.  What is called free trade looks to the maintenance of the foreign monopoly for supplying us with cloth and iron; and international copyright looks to continuing the monopoly which Britain has so long enjoyed of furnishing us with books; and both tend towards centralization.

The rapid advance that has been made in literature and science is the result of the perfect protection afforded by decentralization.  Every neighborhood collects taxes to be expended for purposes of education, and it is from among those who would not otherwise be educated, and who are thus protected in their efforts to obtain instruction, that we derive many of our most thoughtful and intelligent men, and our best authors.  The advocates of free trade and international copyright are, to a great extent, disciples in that school in which it is taught that it is an unjust interference with the rights of property to compel the wealthy to contribute to education of the poor.  Common schools,