To the Editor of Liberty:

Notwithstanding your discouraging remarks on my last letter, I cannot refrain from saying at least a few words.

I had proposed to base our arguments on three axioms of which we are conscious by experience only, and after showing that the proposition known as The Law of Equal Freedom is a deduction therefrom, I had asked if you accept still other axiomatical results of observation from which you derive your conclusions. In answer I am told that a generalization from known and long observed phenomena seems to have no value for me as a guide, etc.

By endorsing Henry George’s dogmatical assertion that property in concrete things is a natural right while that in ideas is an artificial attempt to share our bounties, you postulated such a radical difference between the two forms of ownership that a discussion with parallel arguments was precluded. My object was not to repeat a tale, but to affirm the identity of both forms of ownership, holding that copyrights and other rights of ownership come under the same definition. I am perfectly willing to adapt my definition of the right of ownership to yours by substituting the word agreement for promise, arguing that unanimity, if such could exist, would be the most perfect agreement conceivable, even when it is of a tacit nature. But you appear to find fault with the term supreme power. I purposely selected that term, believing that it is embraced in your definition. A unanimous agreement would indeed constitute a power more supreme than that of any conqueror of the world could be. Your rejoinder also conveys to me the impression that you consider a true definition of the right of ownership must exclude all relations inconsistent with equal freedom. With this I could not agree, since such a definition would imply a settlement of the dispute by postulate and preclude all discussion.

Believing that a further discussion was useless until the fundamental ground was agreed upon, I wrote the letter preparatory to a statement of my reasons for believing that copyrights are consistent with equal freedom, my intention to do so having been plainly indicated in the last sentence of my communication. Yet I am told that my use, or rather non-use, of the law of equal liberty is laughable in the extreme. I have indeed reason to feel that the departure from a scientific course of reasoning was on your side, not on mine.

I had proposed some axioms as a basis of controversy; but, since you refuse to recognize them without yourself making a counter-proposition, a dead-lock is inevitable. The law of equal freedom is not acceptable as a fundamental basis while opinions differ as to what constitutes equality of liberty. I, for one, fail to see any reason for withholding from labor expended in discovering that which had previously existed capable of being discovered a reasonable social recognition of ownership in the results of that labor, nor why that rule, if adopted, should find exception in case the subject of discovery should happen to be a gold mine.

Hugo Bilgram

Philadelphia, February 27, 1891.