Mr. FURNESS. They charge an admission, and they get the best talent they can procure. They have a few hundred books, and many times they loan them out to other societies for similar entertainments, to societies that are not so poor but what they could afford to buy them. That is one of the great evils that is interfering with the business of the music publishers. Mr. GILL. Do the singers and musicians give their services free? Mr. FURNESS. No; they do not. They are well paid. They have Caruso and Sembrich and others of that class. Mr. SERVEN. There may be a single song or instrumental piece which, of course, can be produced on three or four pages and sold separately; but anything other than something like that in the line of a musical composition is simply valuable to the producer of it because of the fact that it is going to be performed, and it is written especially for that purpose, just as the dramatic compositions are written solely for the purpose of performance, and not for the purpose of their literary merit or as a matter of reading. And for that reason the performance of the extended musical composition is exactly the same as the performance of the dramatic composition. And, to follow the comparison with the patent, in the same way that the manufacture of the patent is to the right that is granted under the patent so is this performance to the right that is granted under the copyright, and the proceeds of the production are directly proportional to the performance of the production. There is, to be sure, a limited amount of private sales to persons who, for instance, find some one little theme in a composition and like to have it in their homes and occasionally sing it in their homes and possibly somewhere else, but I should think it would be safe to say that not less than 90 per cent of all the sales of oratorios or operettas or cantatas--I am speaking both of religious and secular musical works--are either directly or indirectly solely for the purpose of public performance and connected with public performance. The CHAIRMAN. But one of these societies that bought the books for the purpose of giving a performance would only loan it to some society near by. Mr. SERVEN. Unless, as they sometimes do, they would send from Worcester to California for something. It is easy to do those things, and they do it, or have done it. The CHAIRMAN. There might be persons in a society in California that had friends belonging to a similar society in Massachusetts, and in such cases there might be some correspondence and exchange, but that would rarely happen, I should say. Mr. SERVEN. They are in correspondence all over the country--the different societies. For instance, there is a Cincinnati society that has an annual festival there, and it carries on a correspondence with similar societies throughout the country. Mr. WEBB. Your idea is that nobody but a person who buys a piece of copyright music should have a right to perform it publicly?