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By Root 2117 0

the imposition of copyright. With that, the book trade had "entirely disappeared," and the country had become a land of famine and deprivation-of "slavery, depopulation, and death." Westminster had never again permitted "Irish positives and negatives to come together in such order as was required for production of any societary force whatsoever." It was no surprise, then, that "half a century of international copy-right has almost annihilated both the producers and the consumers of books."52

This was why Carey led the opposition to transatlantic copyright- and why his opposition took the form it did. To him this was an epochal clash between "centralization and civilization." Centralization had produced in Britain a book trade concentrated in London, where booksellers and newspaper producers operated in combination. Dickens personified this centralization in authorship, to the extent that he even sold advertising space in his serialized novels to less fortunate writers. The consequence was areal erosion ofintellectual quality. British knowledge, Carey thought, was in decline. "Science, whether natural or social, is not in demand." The knowledge that was pursued there was mere empiricism; since the system could not be defended in principle, British science eschewed the search for principles. The United States followed a different model. There, decentralization made every citizen a reader. "The whole mind of the country" was improving, generating more and more inventions. Already American farmers used machines far more powerful and more efficient than their English counterparts. That was one reason they could afford the time and money for books. This domestic progress therefore both financed and required the republication of foreign works. On a national scale, the reprint industry was one with the rise of American manufactures. "The rapid advance that has been made in literature and science is the result of the perfectprotection afforded by decentralization."53

Carey therefore denied that the true cause of any British author's hardship was a lack of transatlantic copyright. The real problem lay in Britain. Authors were seeking relief not because of a real grievance to do with America, but because they had fallen into the same political-economic system as British industrial workers. Under centralization, the local demand for "information" dried up, and with it the local demand for authors. British weeklies, Carey declared, "require little of the pen, but much of the scissors." All who wanted to write professionally had to move to London- centralization again-where they encountered publishers acting in monopolistic combines, and of course the notorious deposit demanded by libraries. Even popular authors were published in editions of fewer than 2,500 copies-piddling quantities byAmerican lights.54

An author like Macaulay or Dickens, therefore, was "precisely the same" for Carey as an industrial manufacturer who made cloth from cotton in a British factory. The great publishers were the equivalent of steamship or railroad magnates. They had the same autocratic, imperial tendencies. "Transporters and publishers are alike middlemen," he urged (with the example of the Camden and Amboy Railway in mind, which he had publicly assailed for its monopoly behavior). The only thing restraining them was "a salutary fear of interlopers." If some kind of compulsory license scheme could be adopted, then "much of the difficulty relative to copyright would be removed." But publishers opposed that idea as contravening the "respectability of the trade"-the very ideal of courtesy that, ironically enough, Carey had been so instrumental in embedding.5s There was thus no way in practice to decouple the "double monopoly." Carey's po sition here approached that of the antipatent campaigners who reprinted his arguments. For both, the question of copyright was a matter of the fundamental politics of industrial society

But here Carey went further, and resorted to a frankly positivist view of knowledge itself. "Positive knowledge" rested in facts, and in