The copyright of the "Principia" would be worth nothing, as would be the
case with all that Franklin wrote on electricity, or Davy on chemistry.
Few now read Adam Smith, and still fewer Bacon, Leibnitz, or Descartes.
Examine where we may, we shall find that the collectors of the facts and
the producers of the ideas which constitute the body of books, have
received little or no reward while thus engaged in contributing so largely
to the augmentation of the common property of mankind.

For what, then, is copyright given? For the clothing in which the body is
produced to the world. Examine Mr. Macaulay's "History of England" and you
will find that the body is composed of what is common property. Not only
have the facts been recorded by others, but the ideas, too, are derived
from the works of men who have labored for the world without receiving,
and frequently without the expectation of receiving, any pecuniary
compensation for their labors. Mr. Macaulay has read much and carefully,
and he has thus been enabled to acquire great skill in arranging and
clothing his facts; but the reader of his books will find in them no
contribution to positive knowledge. The works of men who make
contributions of that kind are necessarily controversial and distasteful
to the reader; for which reason they find few readers, and never pay their
authors. Turn now to our own authors, Prescott and Bancroft, who have
furnished us with historical works of so great excellence, and you will
find a state of things precisely similar. They have taken a large quantity
of materials out of the common stock, in which you, and I, and all of us
have an interest; and those materials they have so reclothed as to render
them attractive of purchasers; but this is all they have done. Look to Mr.
Webster's works, and you will find it the same. He was a great reader. He
studied the Constitution carefully, with a view to understand what were
the views of its authors, and those views he reproduced in different and
more attractive clothing, and there his work ended. He never pretended, as