What is the excuse? It is that the author who produced that book has
had the profit of it long enough, and therefore the Government takes
a profit which does not belong to it and generously gives it to the
88,000,000 of people. But it doesn't do anything of the kind. It merely
takes the author's property, takes his children's bread, and gives the
publisher double profit. He goes on publishing the book and as many of
his confederates as choose to go into the conspiracy do so, and they
rear families in affluence.
And they continue the enjoyment of those ill-gotten gains generation
after generation forever, for they never die. In a few weeks or months
or years I shall be out of it, I hope under a monument. I hope I shall
not be entirely forgotten, and I shall subscribe to the monument myself.
But I shall not be caring what happens if there are fifty years left of
my copyright. My copyright produces annually a good deal more than I
can use, but my children can use it. I can get along; I know a lot of
trades. But that goes to my daughters, who can't get along as well as I
can because I have carefully raised them as young ladies, who don't know
anything and can't do anything. I hope Congress will extend to them the
charity which they have failed to get from me.
Why, if a man who is not even mad, but only strenuous—strenuous about
race-suicide—should come to me and try to get me to use my large
political and ecclesiastical influence to get a bill passed by this
Congress limiting families to twenty-two children by one mother, I
should try to calm him down. I should reason with him. I should say to
him, “Leave it alone. Leave it alone and it will take care of itself.
Only one couple a year in the United States can reach that limit. If
they have reached that limit let them go right on. Let them have all the
liberty they want. In restricting that family to twenty-two children you
are merely conferring discomfort and unhappiness on one family per year
in a nation of 88,000,000, which is not worth while.”
It is the very same with copyright. One author per year produces a book
which can outlive the forty-two-year limit; that's all. This nation
can't produce two authors a year that can do it; the thing is
demonstrably impossible. All that the limited copyright can do is to
take the bread out of the mouths of the children of that one author per
year.
I made an estimate some years ago, when I appeared before a committee
of the House of Lords, that we had published in this country since the
Declaration of Independence 220,000 books. They have all gone. They had
all perished before they were ten years old. It is only one book in 1000
that can outlive the forty-two year limit. Therefore why put a limit at
all? You might as well limit the family to twenty-two children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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