Here is the simple but sufficient explanation of his imperial and imperious demands. He needed royal revenues for what he felt to be royal work. Were there room to discuss the matter, it would not, I think, be difficult to show that this vast scheme dictated much of the policy which produced such confusion and distress in his government, and perhaps had something to do with that sad, dark scheme for freighting the homeward-bound ships with slaves, which so wounded Isabella's heart. It is a strange passage of human history this mixture of the keenest practical sagacity with the wildest romantic speculation; the most solid discovery ever made by man, made for the sake of fulfilling the maddest dream. Thus at least it looks upon the surface, and what are we to say? Was it all delusion together, the call and the Crusade-was it all the vain imagination of a zealot's heart? How shall we believe in the call across the waters, when the call to Jerusalem seemed to be as clear? I know not that anywhere in Scripture it is represented that men called of God are taken possession of and used as instruments; so that whatever comes from them must be regarded as bearing the impress of the Divine seal. There is an inner core of purpose planted, an inner fountain of inspiration opened, but it mixes itself with the whole humanity of the man, all his musings, imaginings, stirrings, and aspirings, and lends to them all, according to their dignity, a sacred fervour; but it is not always easy for the man himself, far less for others, to disentangle clearly the thread of the Divine thought and purpose which is making him its organ from the woof of his own. Always there is in such an inner core of Divine purpose, which is the ruling power in their lives, but much pulp may gather round it from their own nature, which also they may mistake for Divine. No prophet has laid bare the inner workings of the Divine Spirit on his spirit; we should have some wondrous revelations were that Holy of Holies unveiled.

But I know not that we have any need of such considerations in estimating the great Admiral's dream of the Crusade. It is impossible and Genoa is a noble city and powerful by sea; and as at the time that I undertook to set out for the discovery of the Indies it was with the intention of supplicating the King and Queen, our lords, that whatever moneys should be derived from the said Indies should be invested in the conquest of Jerusalem; and as I did so supplicate them, if they do this, it will be well; if not, at all events the said Diego, or such person as may succeed him in this trust, to collect together all the money he can and accompany the King, our lord, should he go to the conquest of Jerusalem, or else go there himself with all the force he can command; and in pursuing this intention it will please the Lord to assist towards the accomplishment of the plan; and should he not be able to effect the conquest of the whole, no doubt he will achieve it in part. Let him, therefore, collect and make a fund of all his wealth in St. George of Genoa, and let it multiply there till such a time as it may appear to him that something of consequence may be effected as respects the project on Jeru salem; for I believe that when their Highnesses shall see that this is contemplated, they will wish to realise it themselves, or will afford him, as their servant and vassal, the means of doing it for them.'

for us to grasp its full significance unless we understand what the Crusade meant to his imagination and to his heart.

Three things were deeply associated in the mind of Columbus; he believed that they were about to happen in glorious succession— the discovery of the New World, the conversion of the Gentiles, and the recovery of Jerusalem, to be the metropolis of the fair realm of Christ, and the centre and source of boundless benediction to mankind. We may believe that there were two strong reasons, at any rate, for the fascination which the Crusade exercised over his spirit. In the first place, it rooted his new and untried enterprise in the heart of all that was most noble, religious, and aspiring in the past history of Christendom; it linked his novel, and in one sense material, enterprise with the visions of saints, the sacrifice of martyrs, the achievements of heroic spirits, through the most glorious ages of Christian history. Columbus, man of the new age as he was, its true captain, was a man of the mediæval type of saintliness in spirit. Despite his relation to Beatrix Enriquez (the whole truth of which has evidently not come down to us, and which is probably the stumbling-block in the way of his much-talked-of canonisation at Rome), he had much of the temper of the saintly medieval Churchman; and with him it was essential to root his enterprise in the past strivings and aspirings of Christendom, and to weave in its achievements with the most sacred enterprises and hopes of the Church. We may lament that his great practical object should have been mixed up with so much aimless and hopeless endeavour; but the core of that endeavour was what seemed to him most vital in the life of Christendom, and it lent to his novel and as yet, to his mediæval eye, unconsecrated enterprise that sacredness which to a man of his fervent and pious spirit was essential-without which he would never have had the heart to enter upon it at all. And secondly, the Crusade to a man of his temper and peculiar culture was closely associated with a glorious extension of the Divine reign. For him it meant the gathering in of the Gentiles to the Kingdom, the lighting up of the heathen darkness, the overthrow of all enemies of man's nobler nature, the establishment of the throne of Christ on the very soil which His tears and blood had consecrated, and the dawn of a new day of righteousness, charity, and peace on this sad, suffering world. And the vision lent, to the eye of Columbus, a grand human interest to the expedition to which the inward voice was urging him; it was his way of linking on his mission to the blessed Christian hope of the future of the world.

All the loftiest spirits of our race in some shape dream this dream. All the great constructive thinkers, from Pythagoras and Plato to Comte, have found the loftiest exercise of their imperial intelligence in constructing the scheme of the restitution of all things-regenerate man in a regenerate world. Columbus had the visions of the prophets before him; he believed that the great scheme of restitution

had been sketched there by a Divine hand. Give the king Thy judgments, O God, and Thy righteousness unto the king's son. He shall judge Thy people with righteousness and the poor with judgment. . . . He shall judge the poor of the people; He shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. . . . He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water the earth. In His days shall the righteous flourish, and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth.' Thus ran the music that filled his ear as he meditated on the coming triumphs of the Kingdom, as the vision passed before the eye of his spirit of all that the hand of Christ was about to accomplish for the world. The Crusade, the recovery of Jerusalem, following, as he firmly believed that it would follow, on the ingathering of the Gentiles, seemed to him the dawn of that blessed and glorious day. Sin destroyed in the very root, selfishness cast out from man's heart; tyranny, wrong, cruelty, expelled from the world; society organised as a Christian brotherhood; discord quelled, tears banished, pain unknown; ministries between man and man, household and household, nation and nation, vivid and abundant, and charged everywhere with rich benediction for mankind; all that sages have forecast of human progress, all that poets have sung of the glory of the latter day, all that prophets have pictured of the Kingdom of Heaven-this was the vision (and if Christ be King who shall say that it is a false one?) with which he fed and fired his lofty spirit, and nerved himself for the grandest secular enterprise ever accomplished by one lonely man in the history of our race. And his was the hand which was destined to help onward the great consummation; his discovery was to be a vital link in the Divine scheme for the restitution of all things, and the fulfilment of the hope with which the Creator made the worlds.

A dream! an idle dream! would be the judgment of our generation on the vision. Yes, a dream, a fruitless dream, if man's thought is the only parent of it; unless, as the world's strongest workmen, deepest thinkers, and bravest leaders, have believed through all the ages, there is One on high who lives to fulfil the dream.

J. BALDWIN BROWN.

INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT.

BEFORE the 10th of April, 1710, copyright in an English book was property of the same kind as any other. The proprietor of copyright in a valuable work then considered himself as safe in his possession as the owner of a fine landed estate; he could live upon it in comfort and bequeath it as a provision for his family. In the year 1709 Parliament passed an Act for the encouragement of learning,' which was professedly designed to induce learned men to compose and write useful books,' and to secure them against piracy. It was proposed to effect these objects by substituting a term of twenty-one years for perpetual copyright in existing works, and of fourteen years for those which might be published after the 10th of April, 1710. Whilst property was annihilated in this summary way, and authorship was encouraged in this strange fashion, the buyers of books were protected against paying too dearly for them. The same Parliament which fostered literature by reducing its profits settled the price of bread, and appointed the Lord Mayor of London and the mayors of other cities the authorities to determine what kind of bread should be offered for sale within their respective jurisdictions. What these civic dignitaries were to perform for bread, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the chiefs of the principal courts of justice in England and Scotland, the Vice-Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Rector of the University of Edinburgh were entrusted to perform for books. They were empowered to limit. and settle the price of books; the persons who had the hardihood to disregard their decision forfeited 5. for every book sold.

Since a Parliament in the reign of Queen Anne first legislated on the subject of copyright, many attempts have been made by succeeding Parliaments to amend what was defective in the law. Although several blunders have been corrected, glaring hardships remain unredressed. A Royal Commission investigated the whole. question in 1878, and presented an elaborate report upon which Parliament will be called to legislate when matters shall have been disposed of which are deemed more important than the grievances of long-suffering authors. The curious anomaly exists that whereas an author has perpetual copyright in his manuscript, he has only a

limited copyright in his published book. His manuscript is absolutely his property. So long as the reading public derive no benefit from the written page, the law provides that the author may do whatever he likes with his manuscript, on condition that he does not allow his fellows to read it in printed form. Once let it be published, and the author's exclusive right of property is exchanged for one which terminates at the end of forty-two years. Thus the mere act of publishing entails a certain penalty upon an author. There are persons who argue that the penalty is not severe enough. They contend that, while a man is rightly entitled to possess his manuscript undisturbed, he ought to have no protection when once it is made public, and when thousands are amused or instructed by perusing the printed pages. They hold that no author is entitled to any other return than thanks for his performance. They condemn copyright as a monopoly, and the acquisition of money by the production of books as a form of robbery. The like objection has been raised to property in patents, the notion being that certain men ought to pass their lives in inventing something which will benefit the public or in writing something which will be read with advantage. Inventors or authors might not object to follow the course marked out for them if they entered life with plenty of money in their purses as well as of ideas in their minds.

Mr. H. C. Carey, a gentleman whose works on political economy are regarded by admirers in the United States as a new gospel, has put on record a view of authorship which several of his countrymen who publish books, and who dislike paying any copyright, laud as a great discovery. His position is that any person can write as good a book as any other, provided he care to use the ideas which are common property, and that the most successful authors do nothing more than present old material in a new dress. The notion that Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and Charles Dickens were meritorious and original authors is scouted by him as superlatively absurd. To prove that I do not exaggerate, I must quote his words:

Sir Walter Scott had carefully studied Scottish and Border history, and thus had filled his mind with facts preserved and ideas produced by others, which he reproduced in a different form. He made no contribution to knowledge. So, too, with our own very successful Washington Irving. He drew largely upon the common stock of ideas, and dressed them up in a new, and what has proved to be a most attractive, form. So, again, with Mr. Dickens. Read his Bleak House, and you will find that he has been a most careful observer of men and things, and has thereby been enabled to collect a number of facts that he has dressed up in different forms; but that is all he has done.1

According to Mr. Carey, both Washington Irving and Dickens have contributed nothing to the common stock of knowledge, and their labours are equally valueless. Yet, because the former was a citizen

1 Letters on International Copyright, by H. C. Carey, pp. 24, 25.