1875.] The Rights of the Thinker. 301 
invention. Many who speak in public on this subject seem 
never to have known inventors or watched the growth of 
invention. We know that among patentees there are men 
who may more properly be called thieves, and frighten away 
some of the best; but as we have seen the growth of nota 
few inventions, which have been improving year after year, 
with careful study, labour, and expense, we have learnt, as 
we imagine any man who thinks at all must learn—in a very 
simple way—the great value of those of the creative race 
of Britain who take patents, and we marvel very greatly at 
legislators who are willing either to throw them aside as 
too common, or to starve them, in order that they may 
work hard and produce more. We give the unvarnished 
meaning of some of the arguments. 
We have before us a sketch of a new patent law for 
Germany. The new patent court is proposed to be partly 
of lawyers and partly of experts, but there is not room here 
for a revision of the plan. In Germany the re-issue of 
patents has been very unsuccessful: the cause may lie very 
deep—viz., in the constitution of the German mind, which 
sees principles too much, and not the facts. Facts we know 
are endless, but if we take the principles out we find them 
few, and one thing becomes similar to many other things, 
and in acertain sense the same. The real practical meaning 
and value of an invention is therefore lost to minds of a 
certain stamp. In Americathis has not occurred. It is quite 
uncertain whether the English mind will be suited to form 
a court of patents,—it must be tried. To judge from the 
actions at law we should lose hope; but we may find 
another result when men are allowed to judge, freed from 
the trammels of precedent and ancient habit of thought, 
and free from the irritating arguments so often brought 
about apparently to complicate the subject. We are in- 
clined to think that no men in Europe could do the work 
with less bias than the English. We have not studied the 
American habits on this subject. We may be satisfied, 
however, that any sensible men could weed out a great 
many of the applications for patents, and in any disputes 
come to safer conclusions than can now be obtained by 
expensive so-called legal processes. 
When international law rises somewhat higher out of the 
region of those inferior quarrels which have so often led 
men to kill each other, the rights of the inventive and 
creative mind must take a more prominent place; and the 
natural tendency is so powerful in this direction that the 
inability to see it would appear to stamp a man as one of 
