NEWSPAPER LARCENY.
WE have not perceived in the late returns on the state of crime, any enumeration of the average amount of thoughts stolen in a year ; nor are we aware that the new police has taken that species of property under their protection. Yet, in a community where all pretend to be thinkerS, thefts of that kind are infinite in number; and we have of late been a good deal exposed to them. A paper that circulates widely in the North of England, has for months past appropriated our literary and musical criticisms ; disfiguring them besides, to use SHERIDAN'S image, as gypsies do children, to prevent detection. Another paper ; published in Edinburgh, on Saturday•the 28th of November, coolly copied, by way of leading article, one of our summaries of foreign poli- tics ; the editor stating, at the same time, that he had taken it from " a French paper." We are pleased, unquestionably, to see the extent to which our provincial contemporaries avail themselves of our columns—many of them borrowing whole pages from us weekly; but when we save them the expense of labour and thought, we hold ourselves entitled to acknowledgment. They show their wisdom, we admit, in borrowing thus largely from the paper best calculated to supply their wants ; but it would be no impeachment of that wis- k dom were they to acquit themselves of their debt by admitting it. \ Their silence is not altogether the result of carelessness either • for we have in our eye two journals of fashionable celebrity in London, 1 which in copying us at second-hand, about a fortnight ago, put them- , 1 selves to the trouble of erasing the acknowledgment which the first borrower had attached to his reprint of our articles. We hope we shall not have occasion to allude to this paltry unfairness again should the necessity be forced upon us, we shall not hesitate to publish \ the names of the journals that are beholden to us not only for compila- tion, but original matter Of all kinds, and yet withhold the price which .would amply repay us, while to advance it would cost them nothing.
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