meal times, even when the family alone is present. This does at least keep up the national power of talking, though the mill wheels of conversation have frequently very little grain to grind. Talk of this kind has some use as a stimulating exercise of the lighter faculties, which in other countries are often left unexercised. The merits of it are its facility of expression and its ample choice of language; the defects of it, in France, may be included under the one head of insufficient or inaccurate information. Still, in the middle class you will find the most accu rate knowledge of special subjects. All the university professors, most of the men of letters, the artists, the scientific men, belong to the middle class so far as they can be said to belong to any definite class at all, and though in home life they are surrounded by women and children who know little, they will often throw a strong light upon a subject for a moment.

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French politeness to women and French kindness to children have placed men at a disadvantage in home life since the old paternal authority has died away. There is a clatter of small talk, and unless the father can take share in it, he may sometimes feel solitary at his own table. After a day of business, he may come home tired and may not feel equal to the innocent but rather light babble of a French family, and then the talk will go on without him. Or he may make an effort to be amusing and not be quite successful, from the lack of youthful elasticity; or he may want to talk about something that interests him, but that is beyond the family audience. In former times the father had the paternal dignity and could take a becoming refuge in that; in the present day he is but one of the members of a little democratic home parliament that receives or rejects his opinions without deference. Again, in French families, particularly of the middle classes, the preponderance of the mother is very strongly marked. It is easily explicable by very evident causes. She rules the house in detail, she gives orders to children and servants, so that the father appears infrequently as an acting authority. She wins power by her activity and attention to detail, and by her presence. The father is away during the daytime and is considered to have but two duties in life, regularity in monthly payments for household expenses and regularity at meal times.

The monthly payments are not seen by the children, still less the labour and intelligence that go to the earning of them, but they feel the maternal power. The servants are usually women, and a man cannot command women; he may ask for services, gently -he does not give orders as he would to a man servant.

Rather overpowered at home by the feminine and infantine, or puerile, majority, the Frenchman often, though not always, seeks refuge in the cafe. There he meets with men of his own age, often of another class, but he does not look very closely into that, and he spends his evening sipping beer and smoking. Such excitement as there is in the delights of a café in a small country town is surely of a very mild kind, yet it may be better mental entertainment than any enjoyed by the wife who sits alone and tries to read or knit when the children have gone to bed. There are husbands, perfectly irreproachable as to all serious duties and obligations, who leave their wives every evening just after dinner, to stay at the café till eleven. They see nothing wrong in it; they do not go for the drink and are never tipsy; they go for a little intercourse with mature minds of the male sex. They are merely keeping up a bachelor habit; still, it is a kind of semi-separation. Taking French life as it is, with the predomi nance in home life of the feminine and the immature, and the rarity-in comparison with England-of hospitality in the house, the cafe seems to be a necessary institution. The explanation of it is not the need of drink, which might be had at home, but the want of masculine society.

The smallness of French dwellings is probably answerable for the tendency to put infants out to nurse and to send boys to boarding school. In a small apartment boys are noisy, troublesome, and in the way; and owing to French indulgence of children, they are likely to become unruly. Now, in France the facilities for getting rid of boys are very great and very tempting. The state has lycées and colleges all over France, where board and education are given below cost price, and if a father is a Republican, or simply a Liberal, he will send his son to one of these. I have seen an absurd statement in an English periodical that only very poor people send their boys to the lycées. M. Eiffel, who bought a town residence for two millions of francs,

sends his son to the Lycée Janson, and there are many other similar cases. If a father is clerical in his tendencies, he has the ecclesiastical schools. The Church is even more hospitable than the state; she gives food, lodging, and education for less than the cost of the food alone. Again, the Church relieves parents even more effectually than the state, as she keeps the boys longer and more vigorously away from home. She has her own reasons for this: she desires to substitute her own authority for parental authority and her own influence for the contagion of "the world"-that is, of the few occasional lay visitors who may spend an hour or two in the father's house. With all these facilities, there is every temptation to insure quietness in the narrow home by the simple process of banishing the boys. The class in which home education is most frequent is the wealthier part of the nobility. Being anxious to avoid the association of their boys with the sons of their social inferiors, they often have them educated at home by private tutors, always either priests or strictly Catholic laymen. This, no doubt, is the best way of preserving some degree of parental influence, and it is healthy, physically, for the boys, who escape from the confinement of the schools and live, instead, in various country houses. Unfortunately, this home education in a narrow and exclusive class, full of reactionary prejudices, has an evil effect in fostering social and political illusions and in preparing men who might have been suitable for the eighteenth century, but who will be out of place in the twentieth.

A home education in the wealthy French nobility is, however, much better in one respect than such an education could ever be in the middle class, for this reason: the nobility see a good deal of society, though it is almost exclusively amongst themselves and quite, exclusively amongst people of their own way of thinking. Home-bred boys in the noblesse are, therefore, not so much shut up as they would be in middle-class existence. The rich nobility, by change of residence and by travel, also see much more of the world and get a sort of education through their eyes.

P. G. HAMERTON.

THE AMERICAN COPYRIGHT ACT.

So much has been already written on this law that I propose in this article to confine myself chiefly to an examination of its general policy, and to draw attention to the effect of the act in European countries.

A very definite intention pervades all previous legislation, and the object of its enactment is clearly set forth. In the United States it is "to promote the progress of literature and art by securing for limited times to authors and artists, the exclusive right to their respective writings and art productions." In Great Britain it is "to afford greater encouragement to the production of literary works of lasting benefit to the world." In other countries of Europe the intention, though not defined, is obviously the same, and nowhere do we find the subject of book manufacture mixed up with copyright-property protection except in Holland.

That this policy should be departed from by the United States will not surprise those who have watched commercial legislation in that country during the last twenty years. Under the specious guise of "protection to native industry," all sorts of monopolies have been promoted there. But though France, Germany, and Spain have based their commercial policy on similar principles, yet one and all of them have recognized that the civilizing and humanizing influence of literature and art is far too precious to be tampered with by manufacturing restrictions. The United States, however, could not resist the temptation to try to move the literary centre from the Eastern hemisphere. That this has been the object of the manufacturing clauses in the new law appears from the evidence of Mr. Kennedy before the House Judiciary Committee at Washington on behalf of the International Typographical Union. He says: "Its effects will be to greatly stimulate printing in the United States," and, indorsing the opinion of the London "Times," adds:

"By this law the literary and book-publishing centre of the English world will move westward from London and take up its abode in the city of New York."

The peculiarity which distinguishes this act from previous legislation is that it refuses to protect copyright property unless the book containing it has been set up and printed within the United States. A particular copy of any book is protected, and the stealer of it is punishable by law; but if the mortgage of the American printer is not satisfied, anybody may utilize its contents-perhaps the fruits of a year or two's toil-to enrich himself at the author's expense.

I quite sympathize with the promoters of this act. It represents a noble effort on the part of Americans to fix on their statute book the grand principle that the labourer is worthy of his hire, and that the fruits of his toil deserve the protection of all civilized countries, irrespective of their place of origin; but I cannot refrain from referring to the hampering restrictions in it which so formidably neutralize this action. Yet, notwithstanding my strong objections to its blemishes and my protest against its deviation from the pure policy of previous acts, I do not hesitate to express the opinion that the new act (exclusive of its manufacturing features) is better and much simpler than our own cumbrous law, and that Great Britain might with advantage and with but slight amplification substitute it for her own. I know that the surrounding circumstances have been too strong for copyright legislators and that they have been, most unwillingly in many cases, compelled to yield to influences too powerful for them to overcome.

I have referred to books as if they were almost the only objects of copyright, because I think them typical enough to illustrate the purport of this paper, but I am not unaware of the liberal largeness of American, foreign, and British copyright legislation, and that it takes under its sheltering care every production in the literary, scientific, and artistic domain.

To gauge some of the results likely to issue from this change of law, it is necessary briefly to notice the current course of trade on the two sides of the Atlantic. At the present time books popular in both markets are generally reproduced in each.