"Here, you will observe, you waive altogether the question of right which you so strongly enforce in regard to yourselves. It may be that you have reason; but if so, how do you yourselves stand in your relations with the great mass of human beings whose right to this common property is equal with your own? For thousands of years working men, collectors of facts and philosophers, have been contributing to the common stock, and the treasure accumulated is now enormously great; and yet the mass of mankind remain still ignorant, and are poor, depraved, and wretched, because ignorant. Under such circumstances, justice would seem to require of the legislator that he should sanction no measure tending to throw unnecessary difficulty in the way of the dissemination of knowledge. To do so, would be to deprive the many of the power to profit by their interest in the common property. To do so, would be to deprive the men who have contributed to the accumulation of this treasure of even the reward to which, as you admit, they justly may make a claim. If they are to be satisfied with fame, we must do nothing tending to limit the dissemination of their ideas, because to do so would be to limit their power to acquire fame. If they are to be satisfied with the idea of doing good to their fellow-men, we must avoid every thing tending to limit the knowledge of their discoveries, because to do so would be to deprive them of much of their small reward. The state of the matter is, as I conceive, as follows: On one side of you stand the contributors to the vast treasure of knowledge that mankind has accumulated, and is accumulating--men who have, in general, labored without fee or reward; on the other side of you stand the owners of this vast treasure, desirous to have it fashioned in a manner to suit their various tastes and powers, that all may be enabled to profit by its possession. Between them stand yourselves, middlemen between the producers and the consumers. It is your province to combine the facts and ideas, as does the manufacturer when he takes the raw materials of cloth, and, by the aid of the skill of numerous working men, past and present, elaborates them into the beautiful forms that so much gratify our eyes in passing through the Crystal Palace. For this service you are to be paid; but to enable you to receive payment you need the aid of the legislator, as the common law grants no more copyright for the form in which ideas are expressed than for the ideas themselves. In granting this aid he is required to see that, while he secures that you have justice, he does no injustice to the men who produce the raw material of your books, nor to the community whose common property it is. In granting it, he is bound to use his efforts to attain the knowledge needed for enabling him to do justice to all parties, and not to you alone. The laws which elsewhere govern the distribution of the proceeds of labor, must apply in your case with equal force. Looking at them, we see that, with the growth of population and of wealth, there is everywhere a tendency to diminution in the proportion of the product that is allowed to the men who stand between the producer and the consumer. In new settlements, trade is small and the shopkeeper requires large profits to enable him to live; and, while the consumer pays a high price, the producer is compelled to be content with a low one. In new settlements, the miller takes a large toll for the conversion of corn into flour, and the spinner and weaver take a large portion of the wool as their reward for converting the balance into cloth. Nevertheless, the shopkeeper, the miller, the spinner, and the weaver are poor, because trade is small. As wealth and population grow, we find the shopkeeper gradually reducing his charge, until from fifty it falls to five per cent.; the miller reducing his, until he finds that he can afford to give all the flour that is yielded by the corn, retaining for himself the bran alone; and the spinner and weaver contenting himself with a constantly diminishing proportion of the wool; and now it is that we find shopkeepers, millers, and manufacturers grow rich, while consumers are cheaply supplied because of the vast increase of trade. In your case, however, the course of proceeding has been altogether different. Half a century since, when our people were but four millions in number, and were poor and scattered, gentlemen like you were secured in the monopoly of their works for fourteen years, with a power of renewal for a similar term.