We have had copyright laws in this country now for exactly one hundred and sixteen years, and none of them have been scientific; none of them have been systematic; none of them have been well developed. It is high time that the whole system of legislation upon the subject should be put upon a scientific basis and should be developed in a scientific form. This bill is a sincere attempt to accomplish that result. It contains a number of provisions which I heartily approve. It contains much that I think ought to be amended. I trust that out of this bill, and before the end of the present Congress, a bill will be evolved which will be enacted into law, and which will be just as to all parties and of very much benefit to the American people, and of benefit to the composers and the authors, who are the particular subjects of the bill. I believe, however, that before that result is accomplished extensive amendments must be made in this bill. I am going to devote the first ten minutes of my time to stating the principles upon which I think those amendments ought to be framed, and after that I am going to apply those principles to portions of the bill, to show what changes would result from the application of those principles to the bill. In order to say what I intend to say on the subject of principles, it will be necessary for me to indulge in a few moments of historical statement. When the scholar looks over the civilizations of history, he finds only one principle that pervades them all, and that principle is the principle and idea of the continuity of private property. China, Greece, Rome, Babylon, Nineveh, Judea, Egypt, England, Germany, Russia, the United States are all pervaded, as Japan is, by the notion of the continuity of private property. And when I speak of the continuity of private property I mean its continuous continuity, its hereditable character, its passing down from father to son, from age to age, and from generation to generation. My good friends Victor Herbert and John Philip Sousa, men whom I respect personally as well as professionally, are basing their desire for the passage of this bill upon the notion which they have that that idea of the continuity of private property inheres in their intellectual productions; and there is exactly where my brothers are mistaken. I am myself an author. I am an author of books and writings. A hundred of them probably have been published. I am the author of a very large number of addresses, which have been delivered without writing, on religious, historical, economic, legal, scientific, and miscellaneous subjects; but I know, as well as I know any proposition in history or in law, that I have not any element of private property in any of those intellectual productions, in the sense in which I am defining private property, namely, with the idea of continuity.