During the centuries in which the censorship of the Church was active and comprehensive, it must have exerted a very material influence over the relations of authors with their public; the effectiveness of literature as an intellectual force in directing or shaping public opinion was assuredly not a little hampered and restricted, while the value of literary productions as property was seriously lessened and, in certain territories, entirely destroyed. It is evident that if the production, the sale, and the possession of copies of a book are prohibited, the work can possess no property value within the territory throughout which such prohibition can be enforced. Its possibilities as property are either cancelled altogether, in case the prohibition can be made effective throughout the entire possible market, or are lessened in the proportion in which such market has been curtailed. In fact, in the cases in which, under the more extreme penalties of a censorship system, the purchase or the possession of a copy of a condemned work involved fine, imprisonment, or excommunication, the work might be said to possess a negative in place of a positive commercial value. The author, and others interested with the author, in securing a circulation for the book, might even be imagined as offering, if not a bonus, something in the nature of a guaranty against risks, to those who would co-operate with them in the dangerous task of distributing copies. The other obstacles that have been noted as standing in the way of the development of literary property had been negative in their character. The lack of realisation on the part of the literary worker himself that he was producing anything entitled to be classed as property; the difficulty on the part of the reading public in arriving at the conception that there could be property in anything not material, in such an abstract entity as a right; the physical impossibility, in advance of the invention of printing, of the multiplication of copies of a literary production by any method that should preserve for the author any control over the text of each copy, or any share in the selling price of the same; the limitations of the territory within which, after the era of printed books had begun, and after the development of public opinion had brought a community to the point of recognising the property rights of one of its own literary workers, such recognition could be made effective; the fragmentary character and necessary inadequacy of the system of local privileges; and finally the lack, during a long series of years after the invention of printing, of any adequate publishing machinery for making known to possible buyers the existence of books, for distributing the copies, and for collecting the amounts paid by the purchasers;--all these obstacles operated against the possibility of securing for producers of literature such protection under the law and such recognition for the results of their