COPYRIGHT AND PROTECTION.
[To TRY EDITOR OF TIM "SPECTATOR:1 8174—Mr. John Murray's letter in your last issue is inform- ing. I am happy to have elicited it. But it is, I venture to say, outside my argument, and so also was your editorial criticism in the previous issue. Yon say that the reproduction for eightpenca in America of the Review which Mr. Arthur Elliot edits so ably is "stealing," that the stolen goods are stopped in our ports, and that there is no analogy between Protection and Copyright. Certainly it is stealing, but only because the law haa created the condition of theft. It is mak prohibita, just as smuggling is ; it is not ma/a in re. And who made the law ? The "intellectuals." • They have so manipulated legislation that they alone buy in the cheapest market, but sell in a protected market. They say to Labour "No protection for muscle product, but for my brain product unlimited protection all the days of my life and seven years after. You working men must submit to an unrestricted competition with the labour of naked rice-eaters because I want to make a fortune from the sale of the Edinburgh at five shillings ; mid not only so, but I want the maximum purchasing power for each of the five shillings, and this maximum purchasing power is incom- patible with a Protective tariff." The intellectuals have been extraordinarily mean, and not only mean, but short-sighted too. . They would probably have made more money had they both invented and championed Protection instead of Free- trade, and had. also sold their books by the million to the million. In the economy of the universe we shall yet live to see the day when the hand is protected and not the brain.—
[Mr. Moreton Freweit's argument is entirely beside the mark. The Free-trader 'does not want to destroy property, but to allow exchanges to be free and unimpeded. He allows property in copyright, but he does not forbid freo.exchange in the case of the property created. As we said a fortnight ago, if authors are to be protected, it must be by forbidding foreign writers to sell their wares here, and insisting that our people shall only read British novels, British poems, British histories, and British works on science. As a matter of fact, the majority of those whom Mr. Frewen describes as " intellectuals " are Protectionists, not Free-traders.—En. Spectator.]
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