As it is, by fair means or foul, the weekly newspaper press, with its broad sheet spread to the breeze, is making great head against the slow-sailing progress of such as trust to the more regular trade-winds for their speed. And this, fortunately (as error cannot long abide in itself,) is creating changes of opinion of infinite advantage to the great cause of international copyright. A little while ago, we had the publishers petitioning and declaiming against an international copyright, (I forget what arguments they employed;) and, lo! their breath is scarcely spent when the ground slides from under them, and the whole publishing business—at least a considerable section of it—which they meant to uphold by false and hollow props, has tumbled into chaos, and an organic change has passed through the world of publication. Now they begin—and we are glad to have so powerful and so respectable a body convert to our side, on whatever terms—to see the matter in a new light; the affection for the people, and the cheap enlightenment of the people, and the people’s wives and children, which they made bold (out of an exceeding philanthropy) to proclaim in market-places and the lobbies of Congress, is wonderfully dwindled. It isn’t a pleasant thing, after all, to have one’s printing-house and bindery burned to the ground, even for so laudable an object. Suppose we have the law: a little civilized recognition of the rights of authors (merely by way of clincher, however, to the absolute, primary and indefeasible rights of publishers) might be an agreeable change from this barbarous system of non-protection. The old plan, it must be admitted, has its disadvantages. Let’s have the law! And here you may suppose the hats of certain old, respected and enterprising publishers to rise into the air, in a sort of fervor or ecstasy, which it is entirely out of their power to control. Is there or is there not a property in a book: a primitive, real, fundamental right in its ownership as in any estate or property? Often and clearly as this question has been determined, the opponents of a law, by stress of argument, are driven upon denying it over and over again, and making use of every sort of ridiculous and irrelevant illustration to crowd the right out of the way. They fly into all corners of creation in pursuit of an analogy, and come back without as much as a sparrow in their bag.