Our old Common Law was clear enough. Subject only to laws or customs about licensing and against profane books and the like, the right of publishing and selling any book belonged exclusively to the author and persons claiming through him. Books were as much the subjects of property-rights as lands in Kent or money in the bank. The term of enjoyment knew no period. Fine fantastic ideas about genius endowing the world and transcending the narrow bounds of property were not countenanced by our Common Law. Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, in the year 1680, belonged to Mr. Ponder: _Paradise Lost_, in the year 1739, was the property of Mr. Jacob Tonson. Mr. Ponder and Mr. Tonson had acquired these works by purchase. Property-rights of this description seem strange to us, even absurd. But that is one of the provoking ways of property-rights. Views vary. Perhaps this time next century it will seem as absurd that Ben Mac Dhui should ever have been private property as it now does that in 1739 Mr. Tonson should have been the owner 'of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree.' This is not said with any covered meaning, but is thrown out gloomily with the intention of contributing to the general depreciation of property. If it be asked how came it about that authors and booksellers allowed themselves to be deprived of valuable and well-assured rights--to be in fact disinherited, without so much as an expostulatory ode or a single epigram--it must be answered, strange as it may sound, it happened accidentally and through tampering with the Common Law. Authors are indeed a luckless race. To be deprived of your property by Act of Parliament is a familiar process, calling for no remarks save of an objurgatory character; but to petition Parliament to take away your property--to get up an agitation against yourself, to promote the passage through both Houses of the Act of spoliation, is unusual; so unusual indeed that I make bold to say that none but authors would do such things. That they did these very things is certain. It is also certain that they did not mean to do them. They did not understand the effect of their own Act of Parliament. In exchange for a term of either fourteen or twenty-one years, they gave up not only for themselves, but for all before and after them, the whole of time. Oh! miserable men! No enemy did this; no hungry mob clamoured for cheap books; no owner of copyrights so much as weltered in his gore. The rights were unquestioned: no one found fault with them. The authors accomplished their own ruin. Never, surely, since the well-nigh incredible folly of our first parents lost us Eden and put us to the necessity of earning our living, was so fine a property--perpetual copyright--bartered away for so paltry an equivalent.