property has only forty-two years of life under our unjust statutes, and
if it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out the aggressors and
punish them, as it would seek out and punish the trespassers upon any
other kind of property; it leaves the aggrieved owner to bring suit
against them, and recover damages, if he can. This may be right enough
in itself; but I think, then, that all property should be defended by
civil suit, and should become public after forty-two years of private
tenure. The Constitution guarantees us all equality before the law, but
the law-makers seem to have forgotten this in the case of our literary
industry. So long as this remains the case, we cannot expect the best
business talent to go into literature, and the man of letters must keep
his present low grade among business men.

As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standing
at all. I may say that it is only since the Civil War that literature
has become a business with us. Before that time we had authors, and very
good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but I do not remember
any of them who lived by literature except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and we
all know how he lived; it was largely upon loans. They were either men
of fortune, or they were editors or professors, with salaries or incomes
apart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped out with
public offices; one need not go over their names or classify them. Some
of them must have made money by their books, but I question whether any
one could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his books brought
him. No one could do that now, unless he wrote a book that we could not
recognize as a work of literature. But many authors live now, and live
prettily enough, by the sale of the serial publication of their writings
to the magazines. They do not live so nicely as successful tradespeople,
of course, or as men in the other professions when they begin to make
themselves names; the high state of brokers, bankers, railroad operators,