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By Root 1996 0

facts there could be no property. "Men who make additions to science knowwell that they have, and can have, no rights whatever." Empirical discoverers (Carey seems to have had explorers in mind) might labor to produce such facts, but facts themselves were "the common property of all mankind." Moreover, a discrete set of workers arranged and compared facts to arrive at laws, and finally entire sciences, and these too attained no property. "Newton spent many years of his life in the composition of his Principia," Carey remarked, yet had gained no right in the "body" of the work- not that it would have been worth anything anyway. Yet these were the only authors who really produced knowledge. The class ofwriters who did benefit from copyright produced no new facts or ideas, but merely "clothed" what others had worked so hard to achieve. Robert Chambers was a case in point: his hugely successful Vestiges of Creation had "appropriated" Lamarck's science and "reclothed" it. Walter Scott had likewise "filled his mindwith facts preserved, and ideas produced, by others, which he reproduced in a different form." Carey likened such writers to arrangers who made bouquets from the flowers of other people's gardens. They deserved some remuneration, certainly but never a monopoly. Those pressing for "the interests of science" in the international copyright campaign, he pointed out, were in reality almost always "literary" men of this type - the users, not the creators, of science. Had "a single man who has done anything to extend the domain of knowledge" signed the petitions? And yet writers paid nothing for the facts they appropriated and exploited. Were the Senate to consider a bill to give discoverers monopoly rights, Carey hinted, it might merit examination-but it would never do so, because these same literary clothiers would howl at the elevation of the real hewers of wood and drawers ofwater.56

So Carey endorsed independence from copyright as essential to civilization, and did so on the basis of a sweepingly ambitious social science. He attributed the Union victory in the Civil War partly to "the universal development of intellect among our people," and warned that future progress would depend no less on developing "the national mind." Knowledge must remain available to all, "old and young, poor and rich, black and white." Universal copyrights, he roundly declared, were a relic of the ideology of the slave owners. "The enfranchised black, on the contrary, desires that books may be cheap." The "greed" of a Dickens or a George Eliot stood out as in that light as not only wrong, but shameful.57 The choice was that stark:

Protection to the farmer and the planter in their efforts to draw the artisan to their side, looks to carrying out the doctrine of decentralization by the annihilation of the monopoly of manufactures established in Britain; and our present copy-right system looks to the decentralization of literature by offering to all who shall come and live among us the same perfect protection that we give to our own authors. What is called free trade looks to the maintenance of the foreign monopoly for supplying us with cloth and iron; and international copy-right looks to continuing the monopoly which Britain has so long enjoyed of furnishing us with books; both tending towards centralization.

That was why embracing international copyright would be, as Carey told the Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1865, "suicidal."58

UNIVERSALITY AND EMPIRE

In the nineteenth century, proponents of authorial property sought to deepen and extend the principle across time and space. Wordsworth wanted literary property made perpetual; Dickens wanted it to span oceans. It was the second effort that proved the more richly controversial, because the more promising. It coincided with the age of imperial expansion. Eventually, the proponents had their way. In the 189os Washington did indeed legislate for international copyright (although the United States did not sign the Berne Convention until almost a century later, in 1988). That did not