Whisky and Literature

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 7, 1884

Whisky and Literature.

MARK TWAIN made the following good hit in a speech made at Montreal: "I came here," he said, "to place myself under the protection of the Canadian law and to secure a copyright. I have complied with the requirements of the law. I have followed the instructions of some of the best legal minds in the city, including my own, and so my errand is accomplished, at least as far as any exertions of mine can aid that accomplishment. This is a rather cumbersome way to fence and fortify one's property against the literary buccaneer, it is true; still, if it is effective, it is a great advance upon past conditions, and one to be correspondingly welcomed. It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whisky or any other of the necessaries of life. In this age of ours, if you steal another man's label to advertise your own brand of whisky with, you will be heavily fined and otherwise punished for violating that trade-mark. If you steal the whisky without the trade-mark, you go to jail; but if you could prove that the whisky was literature, you could steal them both, and the law wouldn't say a word. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it."