96 Our Patent Laws. [January, 



the question. The character is often crushed in this way, 

 and the man feels as if his moral nature were injured along 

 with his property. No wonder, then, that we find so many of 

 the best of men refusing to fight their inventions before a 

 court and refusing to become patentees. Circumstances 

 have made it appear as if the law and the lawyers had 

 conspired with the wealthy to turn them aside by ridicule, 

 by force, by disgust, by anything that will rid the court of 

 their presence. 



It is not wonderful, then, that the word " patentee " is not 

 necessarily applied to a respectable man only. If the 

 Government gave a patent to an honest man for an honest 

 invention, the name of patentee would be courted ; a patent 

 would be exactly like a grant of land for services. 



All inventors, however, are not thin-skinned and weak in 

 fighting with the world. There are some who can defend 

 themselves, but to do so must demand much vigilance. It 

 requires wealth to carry out their ideas, and wealth to make 

 them of benefit to the whole world. There are now living 

 patentees who have altered the manufactures of Europe and 

 America, and developed resources that would make a nation 

 rich, and who have been able to fight their own battles 

 without fear of lawyers or of courts. Inventions such as 

 those of Bessemer have made the patent list stand respected 

 by the pirates ; but there are still men amongst us who have 

 devoted years of their life to an object, hoping to gain at 

 least a living by making their work useful to their fellow 

 men. The result — they become hopeless, and in a sense 

 paupers. Give patents under better laws. 



There is much in this age to contend with. The old 

 rights, and, indeed, the only known rights, of landed property 

 seem to many to be unjust, and communism is making way 

 among the nations of Europe. It would seem as if a certain 

 mode of thought pervaded a whole generation. Whilst the 

 poorer classes seekthe re-distribution of land in some districts, 

 the richer classes seem to think it right to demand a certain 

 community of property in the thoughts of others. We are 

 sorry, therefore, to find single-minded and unselfish men, in 

 Parliament and out of it, opposing this latter class of 

 property. They are doing work from which they will shrink 

 when they see its real meaning. It is a higher aim, but no 

 less a piratical aim. In France a leader of temporary fame 

 said that all property was theft. In England we find 

 members of Parliament saying that there can be no property 

 in ideas. If a man spends all his life in digging land and 

 growing corn he may sell it, but if he spends his life in 



