464 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
laws, we shall lose, more rapidly than we have yet done, the most 
ingenious of our inventors, and the most useful of our citizens. 
A policy like this, so Boeotian in its character, and so injurious 
in its results, is as politically unsafe as it is socially unwise, and 
personally unjust. Eights that have been firmly established and 
long enjoyed are not readily abandoned. Illiberal and oppressive 
as the patent laws are, they are still the Magna Gharta of the 
commonwealth of inventors, and in an age tending to democracy 
they will not be surrendered without a struggle. Eights hitherto 
unquestioned, and not more sacred, may be exposed to the same 
scrutiny, and social interests endangered which all classes have 
been accustomed to respect and defend. 
If these views of patent rights be just, and if, as moveable pro- 
perty, they are as sacred as copyrights, there can be no just reason 
why they should not be granted equally cheap, given to every ap- 
plicant, and enjoyed during at least the life of the patentee. When 
a philosopher or an artisan offers an invention to the State, and re- 
ceives an exclusive privilege in exchange, we might expect some 
equality between the gift and its reward. In perfecting his inven- 
tion the inventor has already spent much of his time, and in many 
cases exhausted his means. When a suppliant at the Patent Office 
a heavy payment is demanded, and he purchases a privilege which 
may ruin him. The theory of such a tax it would be difficult to 
discover. Its avowed object is to diminish the number of patents 
for the benefit of non-inventors ; but the object which it really 
accomplishes is to paralyse inventions ; to cause valuable pro- 
cesses to be wrought in secret, and in many cases to be lost ; to 
give fees to clerks and officers of State, and to create a fund, the 
purpose of which has not yet been revealed. A tax sufficient to 
defray the expenses of a patent office* might be justly exacted, but 
to demand a sum twenty-fold that amount is a freak of finance, 
alien both to reason and justice. Will it be believed in an en- 
lightened age, that the sum paid by inventors to the State during 
^ In tlie Eeport of tlie recent Commission, it is stated that the Com- 
missioners “ find a very general expression of opinion that the price to be paid 
by inventors in the aggregate, should not be more than sufficient to provide 
for the expenses of the Patent Office Library and Mnsenm.” — Report, p. x. 
Lond. 1865. 
