exceptions. I can conceive no system more fatal to the integrity
and independence of literary men than one under which they should
be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of
ministers and nobles. I can conceive no system more certain to
turn those minds which are formed by nature to be the blessings
and ornaments of our species into public scandals and pests.

We have, then, only one resource left. We must betake ourselves
to copyright, be the inconveniences of copyright what they may.
Those inconveniences, in truth, are neither few nor small.
Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the
general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. My honourable
and learned friend talks very contemptuously of those who are led
away by the theory that monopoly makes things dear. That
monopoly makes things dear is certainly a theory, as all the
great truths which have been established by the experience of all
ages and nations, and which are taken for granted in all
reasonings, may be said to be theories. It is a theory in the
same sense in which it is a theory that day and night follow each
other, that lead is heavier than water, that bread nourishes,
that arsenic poisons, that alcohol intoxicates. If, as my
honourable and learned friend seems to think, the whole world is
in the wrong on this point, if the real effect of monopoly is to
make articles good and cheap, why does he stop short in his
career of change? Why does he limit the operation of so salutary
a principle to sixty years? Why does he consent to anything
short of a perpetuity? He told us that in consenting to anything
short of a perpetuity he was making a compromise between extreme
right and expediency. But if his opinion about monopoly be
correct, extreme right and expediency would coincide. Or rather,