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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 5
[miscellaneous paragraphs]
As bearing on a recent discussion, « ؟How Fast do Men Speak? » Mr Spackman, a Napier musician, states in the local Herald that he timed the « patter song » by Mr Frank Kennedy as the Lord Chancellor in lolanthe, and found that in one minute he uttered 340 words, containing 440 syllables. This is far beyond the rate of the most fluent orator, using ordinary speech, and is more than any stenographer could keep pace with. The highest rate yet recorded on Pitman's shorthand certificates was on one lately granted to Mr Ernest Wilson—220 words a minute.
The American copyright bill, even as originally drafted, was a complete sham. Its provision that no work could be copyrighted unless set up and printed in the States amounted to a simple prohibition of copyright in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. The initial cost of printing alone has prevented many excellent and useful works from ever seeing the light; and except in the case of light and trashy literature, double printing at the outset is out of the question. A new amendment, however, is more stringent still—it requires that all photographs, etchings, engravings, and illustrations of every kind must be executed in the States. Now a book may be exactly reprinted; but a second engraving or etching cannot be an exact copy of the first. The act is altogether infamous. Open robbery and plagiarism are bad enough; but the pitiful sham which is put forward in the name of international copyright is a worse robbery still, as it takes the form of blackmail. So far from welcoming, as some have done, the new bill as a step in the direction of recognizing the rights of authors, we believe that it will indefinitely delay the settlement of the question. It is, however, quite of a piece with other American experiments of the kind. Like the McKinley tariff, or the recent law prohibiting the introduction of skilled labor into the country under contract, it is an example of economic barbarism.
The Queensland Shearers' Union has brought the colony to the verge of civil war. All public works have been suspended, the whole machinery of the state and all available revenue being required for the maintenance of order. An exceptionally rainy season has baffled the diabolical scheme to devastate the entire pastoral district with fire; but many homesteads and woolsheds have been destroyed, and hundreds of sheep burnt alive. Mr. J. Brown, one of the Executive, threatened « to leave not a station unburned in the central district, » and to « spread sorrow from end to end of Queensland. » Free laborers have been seized and held in durance, and money contributions extorted from railway linemen and their wives under threat of burning their houses over their heads. Attempts, so far unsuccessful, have been made to wreck trains. On the 25th March, one of the executive, who was being arrested for intimidation, threw a bundle of papers among the crowd. These were recovered by the police, and proved to be of great importance, containing the details of a widespread conspiracy, involving other colonies, and revealing revolutionary schemes quite outside of the avowed objects of the Union. On the information thus obtained the authorities at once arrested several of the ringleaders. Unlike the railway strikers at home, these men have no grievance. There is no dispute about wages, and work is abundant; they have plenty of money and large sums to their credit in the banks (which ought to be attached, to pay for the destruction they have caused). The whole dispute is on one point—they are determined that no man shall be allowed to earn a living who does not pay blackmail to the Shearers' Union.