ular history of France had been published in England, and cheaply
reprinted here, (as it surely would have been,) we doubt whether Mr.
Godwin would have undertaken his laborious and elaborate work,--or,
if he had, whether he would have readily found a bookseller bold
enough to pay an adequate price for the copyright. And it is to be
remembered that an American publisher gives this preference to an
English over an American book simply because he can get it for
nothing, by defrauding its author of the just reward of his industry
or genius. That an author loses his equitable claim to copyright for
the simple reason that by publication he has put himself in our power
is an argument fit to be used only by one who would make use of a
private letter that had accidentally come into his possession to the
damage of the writer.

The necessity of some kind of equitable arrangement was so strongly
felt by American publishers that a kind of unwritten law gradually
established itself among them. It was tacitly understood, that, when
a publisher had paid an English author for advance sheets, no rival
American edition should be published. But it already appears too
plainly that an arrangement with no guaranty but a private sense of
honor is liable to constant infringement for the gratification of
personal enmity, or in the hope of immediate profit. The rewards of
uprightness and honorable dealing are slow in coming, while those of
unscrupulous greed are immediate, even though dirty. Under existing
circumstances, free-trade and fair-play exist only in appearance: for
the extraordinary claim has been set up, that an American bookseller
has an exclusive right to all the future works of an English author
any one of whose former productions he has reprinted, whether with or
without paying for it; so that, however willing another publisher may
be to give the author a fair price for his book, or however desirous
the latter may be to conclude such a bargain, it is practically
impossible, so long as privateering is tolerated in the trade.

We have said nothing of the advantages which would accrue to our own
authors from a definite settlement of the question of international
copyright between England and America. How great these would be is
plain from the fact that the editions of American books republished
in England are already numbered by thousands. With the growth of the
English Colonies the value to an American author of an English
copyrig