Poverty and ignorance produce intemperance and crime, and hence it is that both so much abound throughout England. Infanticide, as we are told, prevails to an extent unknown in any other part of the world. Looking at all these facts, we can readily see that the local demand for information throughout England must be very small, and this enables us to account for the extraordinary fact, that in all that country there has been no daily newspaper printed out of London. There is, consequently, no local demand for literary talent. The weekly papers that are published require little of the pen, but much of the scissors. The necessary consequence of this is, that every young man who fancies he can write, must go to London to seek a channel through which he may be enabled to come before the public. Here we have centralization again. Arrived in London, he finds a few daily papers, but only one, as we are told, that pays its expenses, and around each of them is a corps of writers and editors as ill-disposed to permit the introduction of any new laborers in their field as are the street-beggars of London to permit any interference with their "beat." If he desires to become contributor to the magazines, it is the same. To obtain the privilege of contributing his "cheap labor" to their pages, he must be well introduced, and if he make the attempt without such introduction he is treated with a degree of insolence scarcely to be imagined by any one not familiar with the "answers to correspondents" in London periodicals. If disposed to print a book he finds a very limited number of publishers, each one surrounded with his corps of authors and editors, and generally provided with a journal in which to have his own books well placed before the world. If, now, he succeeds in gaining favorable notice, he finds that he can obtain but a very small proportion of the price of his book, even if it sell, because centralization requires that all books shall be advertised in certain London journals that charge their own prices, and thus absorb the proceeds of no inconsiderable portion of the edition. Next, he finds the Chancellor of the Exchequer requiring a share of the proceeds of the book for permission to use paper, and further permission to advertise his work when printed.[1] Inquiring to what purpose are devoted the proceeds of all these taxes, he learns that the centralization which it is the object of the British cheap-labor policy to establish, requires the maintenance of large armies and large fleets which absorb more than all the profits of the commerce they protect. The bookseller informs him that he must take the risk of finding paper, and of paying the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the "Times" and numerous other journals; that every editor will expect a copy; that the interests of science require that he, poor as he is, shall give no less than eleven copies to the public; and that the most that can be hoped for from the first edition is, that it will not bring him in debt. His book appears, but the price is high, for the reason that the taxes are heavy, and the general demand for books is small. Cheap laborers cannot buy books; soldiers and sailors cannot buy books; and thus does centralization diminish the market for literary talent while increasing the cost of bringing it before the world. Centralization next steps in, in the shape of circulating libraries, that, for a few guineas a year, supply books throughout the kingdom, and enable hundreds of copies to do the work that should be done by thousands, and hence it is that, while first editions of English works are generally small, so very few of them ever reach second ones. Popular as was Captain Marryat, his first editions were, as he himself informed me, for some time only 1,500, and had not then risen above 2,000. Of Mr. Bulwer's novels, so universally popular, the first edition never exceeded 2,500; and so it has been, and is, with others. With all Mr. Thackeray's popularity, the sale of his books has, I believe, rarely gone beyond 6,000 for the supply of above thirty millions of people. Occasionally, a single author is enabled to fix the attention of the public, and he is enabled to make a fortune--not from the sale of large quantities at low prices, but of moderate quantities at high prices. The chief case of the kind now in England is that of Mr. Dickens, who sells for twenty shillings a book that costs about four shillings and sixpence to make, and charges his fellow-laborers in the field of literature an enormous price for the privilege of attaching to his numbers the advertisements of their works, as is shown in the following paragraph from one of the journals of the day:--