One of Henri Murger's heroes hired a man to waken him every morning, tell him what the weather was like, and ‘what Government we are living under.’ Without being a prophet, no man can tell what Government we shall be under when this talk is published, but it is certain that Lord Salisbury wished to do something for International Copyright. Matters cannot be much worse than they are. The Americans can get our books, and do get them, and republish them and give us nothing – that awful minus quantity, ‘nuppence’! And then a critic in the Nation (a very good New York paper, though somewhat harsh and crabbed) accuses many of our novelists of ‘getting money under false pretences.’ He does not care for our recent romances, this courteous reviewer in the Nation and he cries out that he is being defrauded. I make him my compliments, and am reminded of the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb. ‘You trouble the stream from which I drink!’ says the Wolf; and the Lamb in vain replied that he himself drank lower down the water.

Conceive a buccaneer of the old sort, Captain Kidd, or honest John Silver, making prize of a British barque and then finding the cargo, cottons or cutlery, not to his taste; he calls the luckless skipper to the quarter-deck, and preaches him a sermon on his commercial dishonesty, and gives him a dozen, and makes him walk the plank, and then sails away with his disappointing prize. The critic's conduct is like that of Captain Kidd, and we may reply, ‘Sir, if we obtain money on false pretences it is British specie, none of your dollars.’ The American author, too, does not enjoy the easy stratagem by which our books are pilfered (by the Western or Eastern robber) ready made. Not many of his countrymen will buy his expensive novel, ‘The Philadelphians,’ when they can get Mr. Besant's books, or Mr. Stevenson's, for next to nothing. So the American authors have published a Round Robin, denouncing the pirates’ industry, in the most feeling and masculine language, as a national and personal disgrace.