race-suicide–should come to me and try to get me to use my large
political and ecclesiastical influence to get a bill passed by this
Congress limiting families to twenty-two children by one mother, I should
try to calm him down. I should reason with him. I should say to him,
“Leave it alone. Leave it alone and it will take care of itself. Only
one couple a year in the United States can reach that limit. If they
have reached that limit let them go right on. Let them have all the
liberty they want. In restricting that family to twenty-two children you
are merely conferring discomfort and unhappiness on one family per year
in a nation of 88,000,000, which is not worth while.”
It is the very same with copyright. One author per year produces a book
which can outlive the forty-two-year limit; that’s all. This nation
can’t produce two authors a year that can do it; the thing is
demonstrably impossible. All that the limited copyright can do is to
take the bread out of the mouths of the children of that one author per
year.
I made an estimate some years ago, when I appeared before a committee of
the House of Lords, that we had published in this country since the
Declaration of Independence 220,000 books. They have all gone. They had
all perished before they were ten years old. It is only one book in 1000
that can outlive the forty-two year limit. Therefore why put a limit at
all? You might as well limit the family to twenty-two children.
If you recall the Americans in the nineteenth century who wrote books
that lived forty-two years you will have to begin with Cooper; you can
follow with Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe,
and there you have to wait a long time. You come to Emerson, and you
have to stand still and look further. You find Howells and T. B.
Aldrich, and then your numbers begin to run pretty thin, and you question
if you can name twenty persons in the United States who–in a whole
century have written books that would live forty-two years. Why, you
could take them all and put them on one bench there [pointing]. Add the
wives and children and you could put the result on, two or three more
benches.
One hundred persons–that is the little, insignificant crowd whose bread-
and-butter is to be taken away for what purpose, for what profit to
anybody? You turn these few books into the hands of the pirate and of
the legitimate publisher, too, and they get the profit that should have
gone to the wife and children.
When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman
asked me what limit I would propose. I said, “Perpetuity.” I could see
some resentment in his manner, and he said the idea was illogical, for
the reason that it has long ago been decided that there can be no such
thing as property in ideas. I said there was property in ideas before
Queen Anne’s time; they had perpetual copyright. He said, “What is a
book? A book is just built from base to roof on ideas, and there can be
no property in it.”
I said I wished he could mention any kind of property on this planet that
had a pecuniary value which was not derived from an idea or ideas.
He said real estate. I put a supposititious case, a dozen Englishmen who
travel through South Africa and camp out, and eleven of them see
nothing at all; they are mentally blind. But there is one in the party
who knows what this harbor means and what the lay of the land means. To
him it means that some day a railway will go through here, and there on
that harbor a great city will spring up. That is his idea. And he has
another idea, which is to go and trade his last bottle of Scotch whiskey
and his last horse-blanket to the principal chief of that region and
buy a piece of land the size of Pennsylvania.
That was the value of an idea that the day would come when the Cape to