author; the law only enables him to prevent any one else from exploiting it, just as it prevents one man from exploiting another man's land. Neither does the law give him possession of the ideas in the book but only of the mechanical form and verbal dress in which they are composed. Hence the customary coupling together of patents and copyrights is incorrect, for patents are artificial monopolies, while copyrights are natural monopolies.
On account of the common element of natural monopoly, the business of a great publishing house and the business of a great railroad have common elements in the economic principles on which they are conducted, however far apart the two forms of business may, in their general character, seem to be.
A paper currency is a natural monopoly; banks did not make it a monopoly. The amount of money-metal in the world being taken as it is, the specie circulation must be an exact quantity, and paper currency to that amount can be issued, and no more. It may all be issued by one bank, or a thousand may compete for it, but its total is limited in value amount. If more should be issued, it would depreciate so that, at least, its value would not exceed the specie which it displaced.
Finally all forms of personal excellence, superiority, skill, and distinguished attainment constitute natural monopolies and find their reward under applications of the monopoly principle. The doctrine of non-competing groups in industry is simply a case of monopoly. Those men who enter into the industrial organization armed only with muscular power and without natural or acquired power to distinguish them from brutes or machines are on a dead level of competition with brutes or machines; then every advancing grade of acquire-
