. . . . That was an odd mission of mineⒺexplanatory note to Washington. I arrive at this deduction by a critical examination of the matters involved in it. Instead of compacting them into a solid block, and thus confusing and dimming them, I will try to make them clear by separating them through the handy process of question and answer. I will imagine myself as undergoing examination by a member of Congress who desires to qualify himself to vote upon the Copyright BillⒶtextual note by inquiring into the particulars of the interests involved.

Question. Mr. Clemens, you are here to represent—whom?

Answer. The authors.

Q. All authors?

A. No. There are perhaps ten thousand American authors, but I have appointed myself to represent only twenty-five of them.

Q. Why only twenty-five out of the ten thousand?

A. Because all but the twenty-five are amply protected by the copyrightⒶtextual note law now in existence.

Q. How do you mean?

A. The new bill proposes to extend the copyright-life of a book beyond the existing limit, which is forty-two years. It is possible that the books of twenty-five living authors may still be selling profitably when they reach the age of forty-two years; the books of the other ten thousand, amounting to an annual output of five or six thousand volumes, will all be dead and forgotten long before the forty-two-year limit is reached; therefore of our ten thousand authors only twenty-five are pecuniarily interested in an extension of the existing copyright limit.

[begin page 321]

Q. Mr. Clemens, are there other persons interested in the making of books, and pecuniarily affected by copyrightⒶtextual note laws?

A. Yes. To begin with, the publishers.

Q. How many publishers are there?

A. About three hundred. They publish an annual output of five or six thousand new books, and presumably the result is an average profit of a thousand dollars upon each—say an aggregate of five or six million dollars; presumably also, they get as much more out of books whose copyrights are dead, and on which they pay no royalties to authors or their families, but filch the author’s share and add it to their own.

Q. It is not the authors, then, that get the bulk of the money resulting from authorship?

A. No. Far from it! The ten thousand cannot be expected to produce, each, more than half a book a year. Authorship is not their trade. If one of these makes a thousand dollars out of his book—and sometimes he does—it takes him two years to do it; while he is making five hundred dollarsⒶtextual note out of his book his publisher may publish forty other books, and make forty thousand dollarsⒶtextual note.

Q. By this itⒶtextual note would appear that authorship is mainly important to the publisher, not to the author?

A. It is true. Pecuniarily, no one concerned is perhaps so little interested in authorship as are our ten thousand authors. Fortunately for them, they do not get their living by authorship; they get it in other and securer ways; with them authorship is a side issueⒶtextual note, a pastime.

Q. Very well then, as I understand it authorship is worth several millions a year to publishers, and worth next to nothing to the main body of authors. Is that it?

A. Yes, that is what I am meaning.

Q. Then it seems plain that authorship is one of the most trifling of all imaginable trades. I cannot call to mind another trade that matches it for pecuniary humbleness. Do you know of one?

A. No—none except whitewashing fences; and even that would be a better trade, if you could exercise it in the winter as well as in the summer.

Q. There are still others who are pecuniarily interested in the making of books? Name them.

A. At a guess, two thousand book-compositors, earning a wage of two million and a half dollars a year—

Q. Go on.

A. Some hundreds of printing-press men and boys—

Q. Proceed.

A. Some hundreds or thousands of binders, paper-makers and printing-ink manufacturers.

Q. Go on.

A. Some scores of illustrators, photographers, and engravers.

Q. Go on.

[begin page 322]

A. Some hundreds of box-makers, packers, porters, and employees of the railways and express companies.

Q. You have footed up a formidable army: Mr. Clemens, is there anybody in the country who is not pecuniarily interested in the making of books?

A. Yes sir—the authors. The ten thousand.

Q. Let us now get back to the beginning and add up results. Some thousands of persons and their families are greatly and importantly interested in the making of books; you have granted that these thousands are all well protected by the existing copyrightⒶtextual note law—protected beyond possibility of hurt; you have conceded that all of the ten thousand authors except the specialized twenty-five, are amply protected by the law as it stands, since their books will never live out the forty-two-year limit, and could therefore not be advantaged by extending it. Now then, I wish to ask you a serious question. You have proven that in representing the twenty-five you represent the smallest interest, the poorest little interest, the most microscopic interest, that has ever intruded itself upon the attention of a legislative body in this age or any other. This interest has been intruding and complaining, persistently, for two centuries, in England and America, and in that period has wasted the valuable time of Parliaments and Congresses—time so valuable, so precious, that if you should reduce that valuable time to dollars and cents the aggregate would amount to millions and millions of dollars, and would build fifty battleships and equip for war a hundred thousand soldiers. Mr. Clemens, how do you excuse the continued and persistent agitation of this matter?

A. I excuse it for reasons which seem to me to justify it. In the first place, upon the grounds of our moral law. Our moral laws endow us with certain rights; one of these is the right to hold and enjoy, unchallenged and unmolested, property created by our honest industries; and this endowment is not discriminated, but comes to us all alike, all in equal measure. It does not give this property-right to publisher, butcher, land-ownerⒶtextual note, corporation, shoemakerⒶtextual note, tailor, and deny it to the author; it includes the author. It is every man’s right—his right, and not a benevolence conferred upon him by legislatures. The moral law existed before copyright, and in authority supersedes any usurping statute that can be inflicted by the legislature Ⓐtextual note. Legislatures can by force of arbitrary power rob an author by statute, but no casuistry can keep that robbery from being a crime. It is lawful crime, legalized crime, but it remains crime just the same. The clause in the Constitution of the United States which denies perpetual property in an author’s bookⒺexplanatory note is a crime, and an excuser and defender and propagator of crime—and the fact that it is part of the Constitution in no wise relieves it from that stain, and from merited contempt. The publisher who withholds royalty from a book that has passed the forty-two-yearⒶtextual note limit under the plea that the Constitution and Congress have granted him permission to commit this degraded crime is not any less a thief than he would be if the property which he is stealing was protected property. In one of our cities there is a firm of publishers that make and sell copyright-expired books only. There are several partners in the firm, and one of them told a friend of mine that his share of the profits of this nefarious trade amounts to forty thousand dollarsⒶtextual note a year. That person ranks as a most respectable man, [begin page 323] but to my mind he belongs in jail, with the other thieves. The late BaronⒶtextual note Tauchnitz was the only publisher I have ever known who was above seizing and using property which did not belong to him, the only publisher I have known in whose reach the author’s widow and orphan could safely leave unwatched their poor little literary belongings. Yet the name he commonly went by, in an ignorant world, was “that pirate!” I personally know that he would not put upon his book-list a book which he had not bought and paid for, whether its copyright was alive or was dead. He knew that no Constitution and no statute can take away perpetual property-right in an author’s book, but can only act as a thief’s confederate and by brute force protect the thief while he steals it. I know of no American publisher who is not a pirate; I will gamble that if there is a publisher anywhere who is not a pirate it is Tauchnitz’s sonⒺexplanatory note.

With your permission I will venture yet another reason for not being ashamed to come here in the interest of that grotesquely small band—the twenty-five authors who could be benefited by the requested extension of the copyrightⒶtextual note limit to the life of the author and fifty years after. It is this: almost the most prodigious asset of a country, and perhaps its most precious possession, is its native literary product—when that product is fine and noble and enduring. Whence comes this enduring literature? It comes from the twenty-five, and from no other source! In the course of a century—and not in any briefer time—the contemporaneous twenty-five may produce from their number one or two, or three, authors whose books can outlast a hundred years. It will take the recurrent successors of the twenty-five several centuries to build a hundred imperishable books; those books become the recognized classics of that country, and are pointed to by the nation with exultant and eloquent pride. Am I claiming too much when I claim that such a literature is a country’s most valuable and most precious possession? I think not. Nations pride themselves upon the splendors of their deeds of arms, statesmanship, conquest; and when they can point back, century after century, and age after age, to the far-stretching perspective of a great history, their pride is beyond expression in words; but it all exists by grace of one thing—one thing alone—the country’s literature. It is a country’s literature that preserves the country’s achievements, which would otherwise perish from the memories of men. When we call to mind that stately line—

we should remember with respect and with reverence that if the great literatures of Greece and Rome had by some catastrophe been blotted out, the inspiring histories of those countries would be vacant to the world to-day; the lessons which they left behind, and which have been the guide and teacher of the world for centuries upon centuries would have been as utterly lost to us as if they had never had an existence. It is because of the great literatures of the ancient world, and because of those literatures alone, that the poet can sing of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, and thrill us with the sublimity of his words. It is not foreign literatures that sing a country’s glories and give them immortality— only the country’s own literature will perform that priceless service. It were worth a Congress’s while to spend upon a copyrightⒶtextual note law time worth the cost of even a hundred battleshipsⒶtextual note if the result of it might some day be the breeding and nourishing of a ShakspeareⒶtextual note. Italy has [begin page 324] many battleships; she has many possessions which she is proud of, but far and away above them all she holds in pride one incomparable possession, one name—DANTE!

I represent only twenty-five persons, it is true; only twenty-fiveⒶtextual note out of eighty-five millionsⒶtextual note; considered commercially I represent the meanest interest that could ever intrude itself upon the time and attention of Congresses and Parliaments, in this age or in any future one, but I am not ashamed of my mission.