For what is sometimes called "literary property" is not property in the strict sense of the word. A book is not like a plough or a house. Its contents even when most original have been but colored, as it were, and rearranged and reinforced by the author's individual mind. Its substance always comes out of the common stock. It cannot be the author's own, as the bushel of wheat is the farmer's, who sowed the seed on his own land and threshed it in his own barn and carried it to market in his own wagon. The rights of the individual and the rights of the Community commingle more or less in private property of every kind, at least to the extent that the latter may tax the property if needful for the common wellbeing, as it is bound also legally to secure it to the owner when threatened by others; it is no part of the purpose of the present book to draw the wavering line in general between the rights of individuals and the rights of their Government as towards them; but the distinction between common property and copyrighted property is plain enough to everybody, and the Law puts emphasis on the distinction by making the one quickly terminable and the other continual. So then, when the Government under which the author resides, has given him a limited copyright within its own jurisdiction, it would seem as if the individual right in the premises had been sufficiently recognized alongside of the undoubted right of the Whole to the ultimate use of the labors of their own citizen. When, however, it comes to International Copyright, which is an attempt to secure to authors of one country artificial privileges under restriction in selling their wares in all other countries, the argument breaks down. Even for the one country, in which the author lives and is taxable, the argument is not very strong, and hardly binds advanced public opinion either as to the grounds of it or even the practical benefits of it on the whole. By the attempted extension of it to all countries, its reasonableness disappears. Taxation cannot extend beyond the jurisdiction of the country taxing; and it certainly seems as if a legal privilege, beyond common law privileges, ought not by extension through the formal action of other countries to exempt from taxation (in case it were needful) the results of the original privilege. The purpose of International Copyright is not the blessed one as announced to the world by James Smithson, "_the increase and diffusion of knowledge among mankind_," but directly and artificially by means of legal restrictions the "increase" of the prices of books and of other "knowledge" to the masses of "mankind," and the "diffusion" of these extra prices as between authors and publishers. Protectionism does not seem to be one whit more respectable in this form than in the form of tariff-taxes on foreign works of art.