Moreover, to refuse copyright to any class of authors (and here, again, I agree with Sir Bulwer), is to refuse it, in part, to all. The native author is robbed of his just hire by such a law, as much as the foreigner. I am compelled by the existing law of American copyright to part with my books for a sum which is under their natural price, and which is not a remunerating price, because I am undersold by reprints for which the authors are paid nothing. Look the fact in the face, ye readers of cheap reprints, who are unwilling to abandon an unjust privilege, which affords you so much pleasure at so low a rate. I have written a book. I have spent years in writing or learning to write it. Perhaps I could do nothing else. The influence of the literary atmosphere in which all who read the English language are forced to live, acting on my special organization, has made literary production a necessary resource. It is the same as if I were a poor shirt-maker, over whose sorrows a Hood has taught you to weep and be indignant. At all events, you approve of my writing, or you would not have read my book so extensively. And yet, because you can refuse to pay foreign authors for books of the same kind, you oblige me to take a nominal price for mine--a price for which it could not be produced by any man living, and less than it would command if you honestly paid for such labor in other instances. You have beaten me down most unfairly. I consider it so; and if every one of the 10 or 12,000 buyers of the cheap edition of "Lady Alice" were to send me a "quarter" (1_s._) by mail, I should regard it as a simple restitution; nor would the sum total cover my expenses while writing it.