"V. Because the good of the whole people and the safety of our republican institutions demand that books shall not be made too costly for the multitude by giving the power to foreign authors to fix their price here as well as abroad." I think we may well doubt whether education as a whole, including the important branch of ethics, is advanced by permitting our citizens to appropriate, without compensation, the labor of others, while through such appropriation they are also assisting to deprive our own authors of a portion of their rightful earnings. But apart from that, the proposition, as stated, proves too much. It is fatal to all copyright and to all patent-right. If the good of the community and the safety of our institutions demand that, in order to make books cheap, the claim to a compensation for the authors must be denied, why should we continue to pay copyrights to Longfellow and Whittier, or to the families of Irving and Bryant? The so-called owners of these copyrights actually have it in their power, in connection with their publishers, to "fix the prices" of their books in this market. This monopoly must indeed be pernicious and dangerous when it arouses Pennsylvania to come to the rescue of oppressed and impoverished consumers against the exactions of greedy producers, and to raise the cry of "free books for free men." There is certainly something refreshing in this zeal for the rights of the consumer, though we may doubt the equity of its application in this particular instance; but we can nevertheless hardly be satisfied to have an utterance like that of these resolutions quoted (as it is in the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) as "the latest American views on the subject." The history of the efforts made in this country to secure international copyright is not a long one. The attempts have been few, and have been lacking in organization and in unanimity of opinion, and they have for the most part been made with but little apparent expectation of any immediate success. Those interested seem to have always felt that popular opinion was, on the whole, against them, and that progress could be hoped for only through the slow process of building up by education and discussion a more enlightened public sentiment. In 1838, after the passing of the first International Copyright Act in Great Britain, Lord Palmerston invited the American Government to cooeperate in establishing a copyright convention between the two countries. In the year previous, Henry Clay, as chairman of a committee on the subject, had reported to the Senate very strongly in favor of such a convention, taking the ground that the author's right of property in his work was similar to that of the inventor in his patent.