tained that point where he might cease to exert himself to go farther.

6th. This, then, is the general reason against all Conservatism against that of the English Tories; now, there is this farther one, which makes the case yet stronger. All our great reforms in England have been partial; they have only mended some one particular grievance which was grown too bad to be endured any longer. No one

has ever looked over the whole system, to construct it on any sound and good principles. Remember always that every thing in England bears or has borne the marks of that most jacobinical system, the system of feudalism in the State and of priestcraft in the Church. Remember that this system went on for centuries with full power to work its evil will. No doubt its worst abuses have been long since removed;-but they have been removed mostly one by one, and many have been still left behind. And in many instances where the actual evil was removed, nothing positively good was put into its place; as was the case especially in the Church and its government. And, therefore, we are indeed delivered from ecclesiastical tyranny, but we have yet to restore in its room the organization of a true Christian Church.

For instance, many of the exemptions and privileges enjoyed by the French noblesse, before the Revolution, have certainly no existence in England. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the principle of equal law has ever fully been established amongst us. Many persons do not know that a peer or peeress may commit with impunity any felony, provided it be not capital: because their peerage is a bar to their suffering any ignominious punishment short of death. Earl Ferrers was found guilty of wilful murder, and therefore he was hanged; but had the verdict been manslaughter, even though it had been of that aggravated character which in a commoner would have been punished by transportation for life, he would have received no punishment at all. This was actually

the case with a former Lord Byron when tried for murder, and with the Duchess of Kingston when tried for bigamy. It is very true that peers are not apt to commit felonies; but the example is very valuable as proving what we said above, that all our reforms have been partial, and that the feudal system, where not reformed, is utterly iniquitous. And many other proofs might be given of the same thing.

7th. Above all, every sincere Christian should vote against a Conservative, if he desires the spread of Christ's Gospel in Ireland. You abhor Popery, and we agree with you; but the real question is, so long as we have anything to do with Ireland,—how is Popery there to be mended? Can there be a more mischievous state of things than what now exists in Ireland? Roman Catholics and Protestants hating one another, and confirming one another, by their opposition, in the most extravagant parts of their respective tenets? Does any man believe that a Roman Catholic people, in any part of Europe, will ever be converted to Protestantism by Protestants, who have been its hereditary adversaries? Was any Roman Catholic Church ever reformed except by itself? If you remember what was done by the Jansenists in France, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--how those great and good men, Arnauld and Pascal, asserted the most vital points of Christian doctrine,-and how far the Gallican Church went in maintaining its independence of Rome; you will be convinced that such is the only prospect of real religious good which is to be looked for in Ireland, and that such a prospect can never be opened, so long as the Roman Catholics are made a mere sectso long as all the revenues of the Christian Church in Ireland are given to a small minority, and those, for the most part, not in their origin the brethren of the Irish people, but its conquerors and oppressors.

If there is such a rule in the world as doing as we would be done by, then the exclusive establishment of the

Protestant Church in Ireland is a direct injustice, and therefore a direct sin. If we may take the property of the Irish nation to advance, as we think, the cause of Protestantism, we might certainly with equal justice persecute the persons of the Irish people for the same object. But God's truth is not served by wickedness; you would disclaim the aid of the State to uphold Protestantism; -is the robbery of a nation's property an expedient any way more righteous or more becoming a Christian;-and does it not at this moment, in point of fact, grievously and notoriously obstruct in Ireland the growth of Christ's kingdom?

IV. THE COPYRIGHT BILL.

[From the Paper dated May 5, 1838.]

MR. SERJEANT TALFOURD'S Bill on the subject of Copyright, has excited, as was likely, no small stir amongst the booksellers and publishers, and they are using all their influence to organize an opposition against it. If they succeed, it will not be owing to the strength of their interest so much as to mistaken notions about freedom and monopoly and public expediency, which on this question, as on several others, show the great distinction between popular principles and liberal,-between those whose object is simply to get rid of all restraint,—and those who think that freedom is only valuable so long as it is an instrument of moral good and not merely of selfish enjoyment.

The question is, however, one of some real difficulty,— and though the booksellers' arguments, if so they may be called, are shameless almost to absurdity, yet on the other hand some of the advocates of the rights of authors carry their claims too far,- or rather they do not see that the author's right, pushed to an extremity, interferes with what is scarcely less than a right on the part of the public,-and hence arises the necessity of a compromise.

On the one hand nothing seems more natural and just, than that an author should retain a property in the productions of his own mind. Lands and houses, it is said, are much less our own than what we ourselves have created,-what other person can have any right to interfere with our own work, which no one else brought into existence, which it may be none but ourselves could have originated?

But yet, on the other hand, the knowledge which we gain, from whatever sources, becomes our own so soon as we have gained it, and we may use it how we will. When it was the fashion to hear rather than to read, if any man with a good memory had learnt by heart the greatest part of the Homeric Poems, would he not have had a right to rehearse them to others, and might he not justly have derived a profit from such a recitation? And is the case altered if a man uses his money instead of his memory, -and has copies multiplied for various persons to read them, instead of communicating the same pleasure to an equal number of persons by his voice and his recollection?

The act of publication means that you communicate to the public your own discoveries, or knowledge, or thoughts, or fancies. You communicate them, not like a secret entrusted to one or two favoured individuals, but unconditionally to all men. The knowledge which you thus give they may immediately turn to account;—they may teach it to others, and make a profit by so doing ;as in the case of a schoolmaster introducing amongst his boys a useful school-book,-as he communicates this knowledge orally, and receives payment for it, may he not communicate it also by writing, and if by writing, may he not by printing?-the paper, type, ink, &c., being as lawfully his own as the voice, which is his instrument of communicating the same knowledge to his pupils.

These two conflicting rights, of the author over his own works, of the purchaser of a book over the knowledge which he has so purchased, and which is thus in a manner

The

become his own, necessarily call for a compromise. author and purchaser being both members of society, society will decide between them. Society finds the purchaser's right, if unrestrained, destructive to itself;-if he whose interest in any given piece of knowledge is no more than a few shillings, the purchase-money of the book, acquires the same right over it as he whose interest in it may be the labour of years, vast expense, and what is not to be calculated, the exertion of his own mind in bringing it to light, then men will be obliged to devote less time, less exertion, less money, to the pursuit of knowledge, and so there will be a less valuable article for the purchaser to purchase. Society says therefore to the purchaser, "Your rights over this knowledge being far less than those of the author, must yield to his, as otherwise less and less valuable knowledge will be discovered, by which you and society altogether will be the losers."

Thus then the right of literary property is fixed by society on the principle of compromise, yet not as if the rights of the author and purchaser were perfectly equal in the eye of reason; but that there is enough of justice in the claim of the latter to modify the unreserved exercise of the right of the former. But the question may be asked, whether the present statute law has established the compromise fairly: whether to limit an author's right over his works to a period of twenty-eight years, or to his own life, be not rather assuming that the purchaser's right is the greater; but that its extreme exercise is modified by some regard for the inferior right of the author. It is one thing to say that an author's right is not absolutely indefeasible, and another to insist that it shall expire at the end of thirty or forty years at the outside. There is no proportion between the perpetuity of all other property, and the mere brief occupation tenure of this.

That the present law is imperfect, the single case of Mr. Wordsworth is sufficient to show clearly. Mr. Wordsworth's early Poems were published so long ago that on