NOTE.

December 31, 1867.

Mr. Dickens's tale of "No Thoroughfare" is now being reprinted here in daily and weekly journals, and to such extent as to warrant the belief that the number in the hands of readers of the Union, will speedily exceed a million; obtained, too, at a cost so small as scarcely to admit of calculation. Under a system of International Copyright a similar number would, at the least, have cost $500,000. At 50 cents, however, the sale would not have exceeded 50,000, yielding to author and publisher probably $10,000. Would it be now expedient that, to enable these latter to divide among themselves this small amount, the former should tax themselves in one so greatly larger? Would it be right or proper that they should so do in the hope that American novelists and poets-should in like manner be enabled to tax the British people? Outside of the class of gentlemen who live by the use of their pens, there are few who, having examined the question, would, it is believed, be disposed to give to these questions an affirmative reply.

Of all living authors there is none that, in his various capacities of author, editor, and lecturer, is, in both money and fame, so largely paid as Mr. Dickens. That he and others are not doubly so is due to the fact that British policy, from before the days of Adam Smith, has tended uniformly to the division of society, at home and abroad, into two great classes, the very poor becoming daily more widely separated from the very rich, and daily more and more unfitted for giving support to British authors. That the reader may understand this fully, let him turn to recent British journals and study the accounts there given of "an agricultural gang system," whose horrors, as they tell their readers, "make the British West Indies almost an Arcadia" when compared with many of the home districts. Next, let him study in the "Spectator," now but a fortnight old, the condition of the 630,000 wretched people inhabiting Eastern London; and especially that of the 70,000 mainly dependent on ship and engine building, "too poor to go afield for employment, too poor to emigrate, too poor to do any thing but die," and wholly dependent on a weekly allowance per house, of front twenty to forty cents and a loaf of bread; that allowance, wretched as it is, to be obtained only at the cost of "standing hours among crowds made brutal by misery and privation." Further, let him read in the same journal its description of the almost universal dishonesty which has resulted from a total repudiation of the idea that international morality could exist; and then determine for himself if, under a different system, Britain might not have made at home a market for her authors that would far more than have compensated for deprivation of that one they now so anxiously covet abroad.

Seeking further evidence in reference to this important question, let him then turn to the "North British Review" for the current month and study the social sores of Britain.

For more than a century she has been sowing the wind, carrying, and in the direct ratio of their connection with her, poverty and slavery into important countries of the earth. She is now only reaping the whirlwind. When her literary men shall have begun to teach her people this—when they shall have said to them that public immorality and private morality cannot co-exist—when they shall have commenced to repudiate the idea that the end sanctifies the means—then, but not till then, the time may, perhaps, have come for lecturing the world on the moral side of the question of International Copyright. To this moment, so far as the writer's memory serves him, no one of them has yet entered on the performance of this important work.