You are all of you aware, by this time, that the extensive printing and publishing establishment of Harper & Brothers, Cliff street, New York, was burned in the early part of June; and that a heavy loss accrued to them from the burning. The fire was attributed, immediately after it occured, by the public prints to the hand of design. “_It is supposed that one object of the incendiaries was to obtain copies of a new novel, by James, of which the Messrs. Harper had the exclusive possession._” Another paper enlarges this statement—“we see suspicions expressed that the object was to get possession of a new novel, ‘Morley Ernstein,’ which was in sheets, _for cheap publication_.” Here is a natural, logical sequence, and just such a one as might have been expected. If the conjecture should not prove a fact, it ought to be one, because this is just the period and the very order in which we might expect an incident of this kind to occur; perhaps not on quite so large a scale, nor with the necessary melo-dramatic admixture of fire. It might have been a plain burglary, prying a ware-house door open with a bar, for a copy; or, knocking a man over, at the edge of evening, and plucking the sheets from under his arm. Piracy and burning are, perhaps, so nearly akin that, after all, they have wrought out the sequence more naturally than if it had been left to the friends of copyright to suggest to them in what order they should occur. In Elia’s legend, a building is burned that a famishing Chinaman may have roast pig; in the reality of the present fire a publisher’s warehouse was put in flames, not only to prevent a famishing author from having roast pig in _presenti_, but also, by a decisive blow, to further the good principle, that there should be no roast pig (nor even salt and a radish) for famishing authors in all future time. Let it not be said I press this point, a mere surmise, too far. Surmise as it is, it receives countenance and consistency from a previous fact, namely, that one of the large republishing newspapers was charged, not long since, by the other—and this was made a matter for the Sessions—with the felony of abstracting the sheets of an English work from the office of its rival. This—an invasion of property—is only one of the external evils growing out of a false and lawless state of things. Of others which strike deeper; which create confusion and error of opinion; which tend to unsettle the lines that divide nation from nation; to obliterate the traits and features which give us a characteristic individuality as a nation—there will be another and more becoming opportunity to speak.