We have commenced the erection of a great literary and scientific edifice. The foundation is already broad, deep, and well laid, but it is seen to increase in breadth, depth, and strength, with every step of increase in height; and the work itself is seen to assume, from year to year, more and more the natural form of a true pyramid. To the height that such a building may be carried, no living man will venture to affix a limit. What is the tendency to durability in a work thus constructed, the pyramids of Egypt and the mountains of the Andes and of the Himalaya may attest. That edifice is the product of decentralization.
Elsewhere, centralization is, as has been shown, producing the opposite effect, narrowing the base, and diminishing the elevation. Having prospered under decentralization, our authors seek to introduce centralization. Failing to accomplish their object by the ordinary course of legislation, they have had recourse to the executive power; and thus the end to be accomplished, and the means used for its accomplishment, are in strict accordance with each other.
We are invited to grant to the authors and booksellers of England, and their agent or agents here, entire control over a highly important source from which our people have been accustomed to derive their supplies of literary food. Before granting to these persons any power here, it might be well to inquire how they have used their power at home. Doing this, we find that, as is usually the case with those enjoying a monopoly, they have almost uniformly preferred to derive their profits from high prices and small sales, and have thus, in a great degree, deprived their countrymen of the power to purchase books; a consequence of which has been that the reading community has, very generally, been driven to dependence upon circulating libraries, to the injury of both the authors and the public. The extent to which this system of high prices in regard to school-books has been carried, and the danger of intrusting such men with power, are well shown in the fact that the same government which has so recently concluded a copyright treaty with our own, has since entered "into the bookselling trade on its own account," competing "with the private dealer, who has to bear copyright charges." The subjects of this "reactionary step" on the part of a government that so much professes to love free trade, are, as we are told, "the famous school-books of the Irish national system."[1] A new office has been created, "paid for with a public salary," for "the issue of books to the retail dealers;" and the centralization of power over this important portion to the trade is, we are told,[2] defended in the columns of the "Times," as "tending to bring down the price of school-books; for booksellers who possess copyrights, now sell their books at exorbitant prices, and, by underselling them, the commissioners will be able to beat them." Judging from this, it would seem almost necessary, if this treaty is to be ratified, that there should be added some provision authorizing our government to appoint commissioners for the regulation of trade, and for "underselling" those persons who "now sell their books at exorbitant prices." If it be ratified, we shall be only entering on the path of centralization; and it may not be amiss that, before ratification, we should endeavor to determine to what point it will probably carry us in the end.