In view of the considerable amount of harsh language that has been expended in England upon our American publishing houses, and the opinion prevailing in England that the wrong in reprinting is entirely one-sided, it is in order here to make the claim, which can, I believe, be fully substantiated, that in respect to the recognition of the rights of authors unprotected by law, their record has during the past twenty-five years been in fact better than that of their English brethren. They have become fully aroused in England to the fact that American literary material has value and availability, and each year a larger amount of this material has had the honor of being introduced to the English public. According to the statistics of 1878, ten per cent of the works issued in England in that year were American reprints. The acknowledgments, however, of any rights on the part of American authors have been few and far between, and the payments but inconsiderable in amount. The leading English houses would doubtless very much prefer to follow the American practice of paying for their reprinted material, but they have not succeeded in establishing any general understanding similar to our American "courtesy of the trade," and books that have been paid for by one house are, in a large number of cases, promptly reissued in cheaper rival editions by other houses. It is very evident that, in the face of open and unscrupulous competition, continued or considerable payments to authors are difficult to provide for; and the more credit is due to those firms who have, in the face of this difficulty, kept a good record with their American authors. One London publisher in London made a custom for years of sending a liberal remittance to the author of the "Wide, Wide World" for each new volume sent to him. But the competition of the unauthorized editions had proved so sharp that he told me he got no profit from his purchases, and did not see how he could continue them. The fate of the author of "Helen's Babies" was still harder. Of his first book seven editions were issued by different British houses, aggregating together an enormous sale, from which he received hardly a penny. For the advance sheets of the sequel to this one firm paid him L50. But so fierce was the scramble for it among the half dozen or more publishers who hurried through their reprints from the American journal in which it was appearing as a serial, that one energetic house sent it out to the British public minus the concluding chapter, while another, still more enterprising, had the last chapter of his edition added by an English hand, and the moral of the story was entirely transformed.