The address at Chelsea was the one on “Books and Libraries,” included in his “Literary and Political Addresses,” an address, almost conversational in its manner, marked not so much by felicity of expression as by a sanity of tone and the easy deliverance of a full mind. A public function quite in accord with his academic and literary tastes was the presidency, which he accepted, of the American Archæological Institute. He took also the post of chairman of a committee to raise funds for the society’s school at Athens. “I find myself a little out of place,” he writes to Mr. Reverdy Johnson, 28 December, 1885, “but I consented to serve because I was so thoroughly persuaded both of the excellence of the object proposed and of the honor it has already done and is likely to do us in convincing Europe that we are not wholly given over as a nation to the pursuit of material good. The English school received its final impulse from the existence and success of ours.” At the end of January, 1886, Lowell went to Washington, at the urgent request of the Copyright League, to advocate the cause of international copyright. Two separate bills designed to bring this about had been offered in the Senate by Senators Hawley and Chace, and there was to be a hearing on them before the Committee on Patents. Several publishers, authors, and members of the League had argued in favor of some action, and one gentleman, the late Mr. Gardiner G. Hubbard, had appeared in opposition. Mr. Hubbard, who was well known as the most active promoter of the then rather new Bell telephone, argued that an author’s right in his literary property differed from that in any other kind of property; “that while he has the manuscript of his thoughts in his own possession, it is his own, and that when he gives it out to the world it ceases to be his own and becomes the property of the world.”[92] He laid great stress, further, on the grounds of the granting of copyright by Congress, as for the benefit of the public, and not for the benefit of authors, and finally claimed that an international copyright would be injurious to the public by tending to raise the price of books. Lowell came in while Mr. Hubbard was speaking, and was called upon by the chairman, Senator Platt of Connecticut, as soon as Mr. Hubbard had sat down. He had not intended to address the committee other than by answering such questions as might be put to him, but the last speaker’s positions nettled him, and he began at once by attacking them.