The political theorist would say beforehand, that under the proposed copyright law the people would be deprived of cheap books; and this is one of the popular delusions that experience must dispel. The present laws do indeed make books very cheap, if cheapness is to be estimated only by the cost per copy, and if legibility, convenience, durability, and honesty are to go for nothing: and if the _price which a whole nation pays for such books in many serious losses_, is also to be excluded from the calculation. The present laws encourage the rapid manufacture of such books as will sell rapidly. Novels and light reading of all kinds are thus multiplied, to the exclusion of more valuable books, which sell slowly; and in consequence, an entire nation becomes infected with the depraved appetite of mawkish school-girls. But these novels must be printed at the lowest rate; for being unprotected, some one will bring them out as cheaply as possible, and he who does so command the market. Thus book-making becomes a mean and debased art; and books are crowded upon the public, at prices merely nominal; having much the appearance, and sharing the fate, of newspapers, which perish in the using. At the same time, these worthless books affect the prices of all books. Valuable works required for libraries must be printed with the least possible investment of capital, or not printed at all. If any one undertakes such publications, he must stint the editor, shave the papermaker, grind the printer, starve the stitchers, and make the binder slight his work. This is the kind of "living" which the report of Congress says is furnished to _thousands of persons_ by the republishing of English works; and such it must be, where every publisher has to make books _to sell_. The books thus published are dear at any price; and the best works do not get before the public at all. No choice American editions can be found of Burke, of Gibbon, of Hume, or even of Robertson, the historian of the continent; but if one imports such an edition, he finds himself taxed at the Custom-house to pay for the miserable thing he refuses. You look in vain for an edition of Jeremy Taylor; and if you import that of Bishop Heber, you pay a guinea to the Customs to sustain the privilege of American publishers to publish it if they choose. The writings of Lord Clarendon cannot be had in an American edition; your importation is taxed, because at some future day it may be convenient for some one to get up the whole in one volume. The same is the case with the whole works of Milton, of Dryden, and many others quite as essential to libraries: but the case is still more provoking with the better class of modern works, such, for instance, as Alison's "History of Europe." Under a copyright law, it could be published in New York from the English plates, and sold almost as cheap as the poor affair now in the market, which cannot be better, because it would be immediately ruined by a less expensive