| 696 | 697 | 698 | 699 | 700 |
| 1 | 314 | 629 | 943 | 1257 |
|
government that robs paupers, and the widows and orphans of paupers and
takes no risk--why the thought just gags me.
Oh, no, I shall never pay any duties on pirated books of mine. I am much
too respectable for that--yet awhile. But here--one thing that grovels
me is this: as far as I can discover--while freely granting that the U.
S. copyright laws are far and away the most idiotic that exist anywhere
on the face of the earth--they don't authorize the government to admit
pirated books into this country, toll or no toll. And so I think that
that regulation is the invention of one of those people--as a rule,
early stricken of God, intellectually--the departmental interpreters
of the laws, in Washington. They can always be depended on to take any
reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it.
They can be depended on, every time, to defeat a good law, and make it
inoperative--yes, and utterly grotesque, too, mere matter for laughter
and derision. Take some of the decisions of the Post-office Department,
for instance--though I do not mean to suggest that that asylum is any
worse than the others for the breeding and nourishing of incredible
lunatics--I merely instance it because it happens to be the first to
come into my mind. Take that case of a few years ago where the P. M.
General suddenly issued an edict requiring you to add the name of the
State after Boston, New York, Chicago, &c, in your superscriptions,
on pain of having your letter stopped and forwarded to the dead-letter
office; yes, and I believe he required the county, too. He made one
little concession in favor of New York: you could say "New York City,"
and stop there; but if you left off the "city," you must add "N. Y." to
698
Page
Quick Jump
|