the profit out of a preceding edition, without making any for itself. That has been the rule, even under piracy. Despite one conspicuous success at the ruinous expense of British and American authors, most of the pirates have lost money.

Most of the labors and risks of normal publishing are given to selecting, planning, and testing new books. Out of the minority of successes the clientage is built up. Until the clientage is established, or stolen, the business is purely experimental, and the profits of the experimental part of it are always inadequate, except as they are realized later through the established clientage. Mr. Smith's plan, as compared with the system of copyright which he calls "monopoly," proposes to render the experimental part vastly more experimental, and wipe the clientage out. Whether, when he thinks it "monopoly " not to give every publisher a chance at every author, he would go so far as to give every mechanic a chance at every inventor, I do not know; but the two conditions are absolutely consistent with each other, and absolutely inconsistent with the development of publishing, manufacturing, invention, and authorship.

Mr. Smith's scheme rests on these three consciously or unconsciously assumed grounds: (1) that for Americans to defend a foreign author's rights over his own work, is to make an objectionable "monopoly;" (2) that the demand for books is practically unlimited; and (3) that readiness to take a certain wild risk is the only qualification that a foreign author should be permitted to demand in an American publisher.

Perhaps Mr. Smith would say that this third proposition does not state him correctly, but that he suggests such conditions as the only ones attainable; but the nature of this proposition must be interpreted in connection with his first one. When he appears in the double character of friend of the foreign author and stigmatizer of his legitimate control over his own property, he is responsible for all that the latter attitude implies.

On the grounds which, I trust, I have justly stated he says:

"It appears, therefore [italics mine], not only possible but quite probable, if a system of royalty copyright, with open competition in production and sale, can be attained, that British authors may now, and yet more largely in the future, derive their best rewards from America."

This inference is drawn from the vast increase of sales under piracy. A more likely inference is that, if the pirates were called upon to pay royalty, while a few of them would lie in wait to seize what they could of any extraordinary results of other men's enterprise, most of them would stop this multiplication of books.

Yet some authors have welcomed the plan, though mainly because it seems better than nothing. But it is opposed quite generally by authors whose income is derived from books to a degree sufficient to make their business aspects matter of serious consideration; and the editor of the "Nineteenth Century " unconsciously "gives away" Mr. Smith's case when he says that "the minority of objectors would include the few strong men who have already been fortunate enough to arrange terms with the 'strong barons' of the American publishing trade;" in other words, the objectors are the men whose books are most sold, and who, therefore, have most reason for the largest practical acquaintance with the case.

Now a word regarding some of the authors' comments on the scheme, published in the "Nineteenth Century."

Sir Charles Trevelyan's utterances, already quoted, were made in 1876. He may now be of a different opinion if he has realized that, whatever may be the fraction of the American market taken by the pirates, the fraction of the author's profits destroyed is much greater.

Mr. Haggard's statement, that the plan is "one to the formal adoption of which the American public appear to be favorably inclined," is probably news to the American public, or at least to the limited portion of it that pays any attention to the subject.

Mr. Morris's letter is a fair type of a frequent grievance I have alluded to before. He claims that his American publisher has sold more of his books than he has accounted for, "because for many years past " Mr. Morris has "been assured by Americans traveling in Europe that this book on every drawing-room table in the great towns of the Eastern States, and a very popular sketch of American manners, published at New York some four or five years back, spoke of it as being, or as having been, in everybody's hands." This is simply one of

is to be found

the large class of cases, familiar to everybody versed in the sale of books, of an author being misled by inexperienced friends, who gauge the general enthusiasm by their own and, perhaps, that of their immediate circle. I do not know who Mr. Morris's publisher is, but I do know that it is simply impossible that a book should be very widely read in America, among the classes Mr. Morris's evidently appeals to, without my knowing of it, at least as one of the phenomena of the book-trade; and yet it is my misfortune never, so far as I can remember, to have seen Mr. Morris's book, or to have heard of it before. On reading his complaint, I inquired regarding the book from a friend who was lately selected by a leading literary editor to compile a volume of poetical selections, which has since been issued by a prominent English house. This person did not, at first, remember the book at all; but later recalled seeing it only in the possession of one family, whose name would at once be recognized here as associated with very exceptional culture. That family admires it profoundly, but it is evidently not yet as widely appreciated as it deserves, or as the author has been led to suppose.

Mr. Justin M'Carthy is, as I have already explained, square against the facts in his expectation that "cheap editions help to the selling of costlier forms as well." Yet Mr. Farrer wants "a wide market with low prices." So, probably, Mr. Farrer, being a benevolent man, would like to see everybody provided with "three acres and a cow;" but one wish is as hard of realization as the other, except temporarily in the cheap "series," with its disregard of author's rights and other fatal tendencies. There is no way out of the simple truth that authorship is difficult, and that publishing is difficult, and that the public, to have the benefits of them, have, in the long run, to pay such prices as they are perfectly ready to pay for other and often less valuable things.

I hope that Mr. Arnold does us injustice. We may not have as much of his "delicacy" in matters of art, literary or other, as the people of France or Italy, whom he contrasts with us; but most of us received our blood from a race that loves fair play better than any other race on earth; and I believe that if our people can be fairly educated on the right and wrong of this question,

they will see fair play done. At the same time, they are human enough not to make it superfluous to show them the side of policy, on which, perhaps, they are not materially worse than the French and Italians. One great trouble is, that the interests that can be readily appreciated are so small, so few dollars and so few people are immediately concerned, that questions which look larger keep this one out of sight.

Mr. Huxley assumes too much in saying that he finds "the moral principles by which the transatlantic English-speaking people propose to govern themselves in dealing with the property of British authors . from Mr. Pearsall Smith's candid exposition of them." It is our loss in many ways that Mr. Huxley has not been among us long enough to know that when a man writes on a politico-economic subject from Philadelphiawhich was until lately the leading manufacturing city of the United States-he is extremely apt to attribute to the American people opinions which a large portion of them, including those represented by the two leading universities, would be ashamed to hold. It was so with our inflated paper currency; it is so with our debased silver coinage; it is so with our Chinese exclusion of the products of foreign civilizations; and it is so with our encouragement of literary piracy, or of any restriction upon a foreign author's rights. Those who were ashamed of the first of these evils grew to be an effective majority; those ashamed of the second and third are nearly, if not quite, a majority now, and are soon to be effective; and those ashamed of the last, it is not wild to hope, will be a majority, and an effective one, as soon as the people have had a reasonable degree of instruction upon a subject where the experience necessary to understand it is, in the nature of the case, restricted to very few; but this subject, fortunately, is already proving itself alive, in attracting the attention always paid to live subjects by inventors of schemes whose motives are in advance of their experience.

HENRY HOLT.

WHAT SHALL THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS TEACH?

PUBLIC Schools are an invention of the state, to be operated only in the interest of the state. The state has no proper concern for individuals except in so far as it judges their good to affect its own interests. Personal weal it is bound to respect only to the degree in which it can make personal weal contribute to the common weal. Its duties and relations to individuals are proprietary, not paternal. If a man cannot succeed when the state has done all for him that it is for its own interest to do, then he must either go to the wall or look to the church. The acceptance of these principles clears from the way some obstructions, and makes it easier to discuss the question as to the kind and degree of instruction which the state ought, through the agency of its schools, to impart.

When we understand what an adult needs to be, in order to prove least of a nuisance to the state and most of a benefit, it is easy to state in general terms what sphere public schools ought to occupy, and within what lines their operation ought to be confined. As William von Humboldt stated the case, "whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must be first introduced into its schools." Public schools we shall, then, want to treat as the digestive machinery, the stomach of the body-politic.

In order to the common weal there are, in general, four things that an adult, man or woman, ought to know; four things, therefore, that the state ought to see that its children have a fair opportunity to learn, viz.: to think, to work, to behave, and to love their country. What we have to say to the question submitted to us in this paper will fall conveniently under these four heads.

First. Public schools ought to teach children to think. Whether in a mill-pond or in the swim of life, it is a man's head that must be kept above water if his whole body will be