It is very evident that, in the face of competition of this kind, the payments by American publishers to foreign writers of fiction must be materially diminished, or must cease altogether. These pamphlet series have, however, done a most important service in pointing out the absurdity of the present condition of literary property, and in emphasizing the need of an international copyright law. In connection with the change in the conditions of book-manufacturing before alluded to, they may be credited as having influenced a material modification of opinion on the part of publishers who have in years past opposed an international copyright as either inexpedient or unnecessary, but who are now quoted as ready to give their support to any practicable and equitable measure that may be proposed. I have endeavored to give in the foregoing pages an outline sketch of the history and present position of the question of international copyright, and to briefly indicate some of the relations in which it stands to ethics and political economy. We may, I trust, be able, at no very distant period, to look back upon, as exploded fallacies of an antiquated barbarism, the beliefs that the material prosperity of a community can be assured by surrounding it with Chinese walls of restrictions to prevent it from purchasing in exchange for its own products its neighbors' goods, and that its moral and mental development can be furthered by the free exercise of the privilege of appropriating its neighbors' books. * * * * * FREE TRADE, AS PROMOTING PEACE AND GOOD WILL AMONG MEN. _A paper read before the New York Free Trade Club, Feb. 20, 1879, by Charles L. Brace._ To the moralist, Free Trade is not most of all important as a means of producing and distributing wealth, (though in that it be the most efficient) but rather as a portion of that movement of humanity which, receiving its greatest impulse eighteen centuries ago, has been steadily ever since removing prejudices, lightening burdens, doing away with abuses, and bringing together into one, different classes and peoples and races. Living under the influence of this great humane impulse, we do not enough remember what effects it has already accomplished, what slow but permanent victories it has won, and what it proves itself adapted to win in the centuries to come. It will better show us what changes await the world in such parts of its progress as relate to Free Trade, to note, briefly, a few of the improvement wrought by the spirit of humanity and by right reason in Europe during the last thousand years. End of Project Gutenberg's International Copyright, by George Haven Putnam