The road skirts the sea or a short distance, and then enters a wild dell, where I saw clumps of ilex for the first time on the island. After a mile of rugged, but very beautiful, scenery, the dell opened on the northern shore of Ischia, and I saw the bright town and sunny beach of Lacco below me. There was a sudden and surprising change in the character of the landscape. Dark, graceful carob-trees overhung the road; the near gardens were filled with almonds in light green leaf, and orangetrees covered with milky buds; but over them, afar and aloft, from the edge of the glittering sapphire to the sulphurcrags of the crowning peak, swept a broad, grand amphitheatre of villas, orchards, and vineyards. Gayly colored palaces sat on all the projecting spurs of Epomeo, rising above their piles of garden terraces; and, as I rode along the beach, the palms and cypresses in the gardens above me were exquisitely pencilled on the sky. Here everything spoke of old cultivation, of wealth and luxurious days.

In the main street of Lacco I met the gendarme of Foria, who took off his cocked hat with an air of respect, which, however, produced no effect on my donkey-man, Giovanni. We mounted silently to Casamicciola, which, as г noted watering-place, boasts of hotels with Neapolitan prices, if not comforts. I felt the need of one, and selected the Sentinella Grande on account of its lordly position. It was void of guests, and I was obliged to wait two hours for a moderate breakfast. The splendor of the day, the perfect beauty of the Ischian landscapes, and the soft humming of bees around the wall-flower blossoms, restored my lost power to enjoy the dolce far niente, and I had forgotten all about my breakfast when it was announced.

From Casamicciola it is little more than an hour's ride to Ischia, and my tour of the island lacked but that much of completion. The season had not commenced, and the marvellous healing fountains and baths were deserted; yet the array of stately villas, the lux

ury of the gardens, and the broad, wellmade roads, attested the popularity of the watering-place. Such scenery as surrounds it is not surpassed by any on the Bay of Naples. I looked longingly up at the sunny mountain-slopes and shadowed glens, as I rode away. What I had seen was but the promise, the hint, of a thousand charms which I had left unvisited.

On the way to Ischia I passed the harbor, which is a deep little crater connected with the sea by an artificial channel. Beside it lies the Casino Reale, with a magnificent park, uninhabited since the Bourbons left. Beyond it I crossed the lava-fields of 1302, which are still unsubdued. Here and there a house has been built, some pines have been planted, clumps of broom have taken root, and there are a few rough, almost hopeless, beginnings of fields. Having passed this dreary tract, the castle of Ischia suddenly rose in front, and the bright town received me. I parted from the taciturn Giovanni without tears, and was most cordially welcomed by Don Michele, his wife, the one-eyed son, and the Franciscan friar. The Don's lumbago was not much better, and the friar's upper lip, it seemed to me, was more snuffy than ever.

In the evening I heard what appeared to be a furious altercation. I recognized Don Michele's voice, threatening vengeance, at its highest pitch, while another voice, equally excited, and the screams of women, gavé additional breath to the tempest. But when I asked my one-eyed servitor, "What in Heaven's name has happened?" he mildly answered, "O, it's only the uncle discoursing with papa!”

I arose at dawn, the next day, to take the steamer for Naples. The flaming jets of Vesuvius, even against the glowing morning sky, were visible from my window, twenty-five miles distant. I was preparing to bid farewell to Ischia with a feeling of profound satisfaction. My experiment had succeeded remarkably well. I had made no bargains in advance, and had not been overcharged

THE

own,

HE nomenclature of common life and the nomenclature of common law have brought with them from an age without philosophy, a time when every house was defensible, when the king was the state, when the large landholders were pares and comites, from semi-barbarous times in fact, words and phrases denoting ownership and descriptive of the subject-matter owned. Property, in the law, is that which belongs to a man, that which is his that which is proprium sibi. And property in land is called real (royal, ultimately in the king, not actual, or of the true sort), while movable property is called personal, because it is attached to the individual, has once been separated from the soil, and has not been reattached with a very considerable degree of permanence. Thus a house built of stone or brick or wood, all the materials of which have been separated from land and reattached to it as firmly as their nature permits, is real property, but the mirrors and pictures fastened against the walls are not. Because of the ultimate royal interest in landed property, injury to real estate was formerly a higher offence than injury to the person or personality. But in a republic, where the liberty of the person is of a higher degree than in a monarchy, the sacredness of property goes outward from the person; and that which is most inseparable from the man - his personal liberty and rights of payment for labor-is of the highest order, and that which is most connected with society, of the lowest. The sacredness of landed property is still maintained by conservatives, and it is only slowly encroached on by doctrines of fixtures and the like. Formerly, all attachments to land were real estate; but now, temporary attachments, unknown to the ancients, are called fixtures, and are held to be personal property. It may be more labor to detach

some fixtures, such as elaborate gas chandeliers, or to remove a portable safe, than to detach some parts of the real estate, such as doors or windows; yet a door in a house is a different sort of property from a safe or a chandelier; and it is a far higher offence to break a door or window in order to steal, than to rob an open safe of millions. Singular as it may seem, there is a sort of property well known to all men, by many hardly thought of as property at all, of a higher nature than real estate, or fixtures, or any sort of movable property, — made property by a deeper principle, less destructible, more valuable, more compact, and in most instances so compact as to be absolutely invisible, intangible, inseparable from the person of its owner. And to this property we shall give the name of Ideal Property.

Before proceeding to the consideration of this, let us look, in the first instance, at the origin of the appropriation or sequestration, to one man, of that which in the early time belonged to no one, because it was the property of all.

A beneficent Creator arranged that man should have dominion over the earth, and gave it to him, with all its products and increments, to occupy, improve, and employ. And it is generally considered that the first occupant acquired a property in, or sequestered, what he occupied from the common stock, and individualized it, subject to the chances of reabsorption or change of individualization by superior force. Taking facts as they now exist, we shall see that the ultimate community of property is a permanent notion. The common burdens of society, the support of the poor, the protection of life and goods from foreign and domestic foes, legislation, and the transaction of all business which is the business of society, of the commonwealth, are at common charge, defrayed by taxation; and

in case of intestate and unheired decease, it is the commonwealth which inherits, be it king or state. Even in cases of testamentary disposition, this theory of community of property is silently, but almost universally, acknowledged by the rich, when they bequeath funds to public charities or foundations.

The universe is God's universe, because He created it. And what a man calls his property is his, because he has made it, created it, out of the materials he had. In the matter of land, if he allows it to be unproductive, he loses its value gradually by paying its tax, or the land itself by having it sold for arrears of tax. He cannot be allowed to prevent creation. The patriarch Abraham reclaimed his well of Abimelech "because he had made it." The miner, by the laws of all countries where mining is a leading business, holds title to a mine by doing work upon it, and owns the ore he has raised, and the metal he smelts from it, by the same principle, — that he has created the metal from the dust, and brought to the sight and the knowledge of man that which did not before exist within his sight and knowledge.

Upon this notion of property in his creations rests the doctrine of mechanics-lien and, ultimately, the doctrine of liens of all sorts. And upon this also rests the curious distinction of the law, that if one simply change the form of another's material, as to make shoes out of leather or boards out of logs, the property is not changed; but if one change the substance, as to make bread out of wheat, or oil out of olives, or paint a picture on canvas, the property is changed.

Upon this principle of property in his creations rests the right of man to ideal property.

Without debating how this purest and clearest creation of man, the ideal, is originated, or attempting to classify it according to its nature and causes, let us only think of it in its manifestations, and classify our ideal property into four sorts, - reputation or goodwill, trade-mark, copies, and inventions.

The consideration with which a man is regarded by his fellows has always been held to be one of his most sacred properties. In times of chivalry, it was for this, in the main, that noble life was risked and taken. But the cliques of chivalry advanced towards the societies of to-day and the society of the future; and society, acting in accordance with general consent and right reason, with a clearer idea of its function and duty, has replaced, by better means and with surer results, the individual redress of wrongs, and forbidden the injured party to be at once complainant, tribunal, and sheriff, actor, judex, and lictor; has decreed that these functions shall be exercised by public servants acting under fixed rules; and under the limits of these rules, and through its servants, has assumed the right of judging of the wrong done and the duty of punishing it; and this has originated the actions of libel and slander.

Good-will is exoteric, while reputation is esoteric. It is that business reputation which induces the public to concur for the profit of an individual. It is a concrete form of reputation, subject to commercial valuation; and is, in fact, the reputation of an individual mingled with, and undistinguishable from, the business he does and the goods he deals in, and affecting the public to such an extent that they prefer him to others of the same calling.

Yet even good - will is essentially ideal, as will be seen by a consideration of the best existing illustration of it,-a newspaper property. The Boston Post or Advertiser, the New York Herald or Tribune, are hardly even names; for in thirty days' time the name of the paper could be changed, and its readers would ask for it as well by the new name as the old. They do not sell because of their editors, for these often change, and but few readers know who the real writers and managers of them are. They are not a subscription list, for that is constantly changing; and, in each case, the subscription list is largely composed of

dealers who sell to a miscellaneous public. They are certainly not either offices or type or material or advertisements, or anything of the sort; for a complete annihilation of all the visible and tangible appendages and necessities of the newspaper business by fire could not destroy the property, since next day all the advertisements, the memoranda of which were lost, would come in; a contract would be made to print again, and, on the morning after the loss, the paper would be published. The newspaper is good-will simply, and is an estate. The profit of a column in the London Times was thought a fit and large dowry for a lady of rank and fashion; and many large fortunes have been made in this country from the business, as well as a comfortable support for hosts of honest and hard-working men.

A form of ideal property more concrete still, and in which the public interest is more directly concerned than in good-will, is the trade-mark. The line between good-will and trademark is as indefinite as that between two colors of the solar spectrum. They insensibly melt into each other. The habit of the travelling public to use a certain tavern is good-will. The special marks and devices of spool-cotton are trade-marks clearly. But the right to use a firm name in a given business is both. Consequently the decisions of the courts have frequently spoken of incidents of good-will as incidents of trade-marks, and vice versa. The law of trade-mark seems to be that the creator of it is secured in its exclusive use, because it assures the public from fraud or deception in their purchases by a designation and insurance of quality. And hence it has been held, that if the trade-mark attempts to describe, and describes falsely, the commodity to which it is attached, it is not entitled to protection; and also that a trade-mark must have been used long enough to acquaint the public with the quality of goods it insures and designates, and must be still in use for such purpose at the time it is infringed.

We now come to property in copies. This phrase is chosen by design, instead of the word "copyright"; because the latter word has been complicated by statute, and denotes only a limited sort of copy property, established for the benefit of society for a term of years, for the purpose of avoiding complications which might arise were copyright without limit, as trade-mark or . good-will may be. And as, in its own opinion at least, the public receives a larger reciprocal benefit in the matter of trade-mark and good-will than in the matter of intellectual publications,

- in the one case the return being, as it were, æsthetic, in the other economic, - the copyright law of statute has been substituted for the perpetual ownership of copies of common right, arising from the creation of the author. It has only been within the last few years, indeed, that it has been finally determined that the statute security after publication, or multiplication and exposure for sale in open market, abolished the exclusive and enduring right of the author or his assigns to control, after such publication, the dissemination of his intellectual work. There still remains to him the exclusive right to control the time, place, and manner of publication; the exclusive right to use in every manner which is not publication, or multiplication and exposure for sale, his production. If it be a play, he can license its representation to one, and forbid it to another. If it be a piece of music, he can authorize one body of musicians to play it in public, and refuse this right to others. If it be a lecture, he can deliver it where he please, and no one can take notes of it to print or to lecture from. If it be an engraving or picture, he can have it multiplied, and can dispose of the prints by gift as he please; - and no one can print it for sale, or even describe it in a catalogue, without consent.

And it is the misfortune of the statute of copyright, that it has taken away the foreign author's right to control after publication, in countries not his own, that which the Legislature of