1883.] Patent-Law Amendment . 9 
leaving equity out of the question, — bids us therefore see to 
it, that the inventor is not compelled to go elsewhere. 
What is needful for this purpose ? We must grant 
patents for a longer term than do our rivals ; we must grant 
them on easy terms as to fees and duties ; and, above all 
things, we must secure for patents once granted an absolute 
duration. In all these points we offer less instead of greater 
facilities to invention than do some of our industrial rivals. 
Let us take the most formidable of these rivals, the United 
States of America. In that country the property of the in- 
ventor in his ideas is secured for seventeen years, whilst we 
grant him only fourteen years. Secondly, the expense of 
taking out a patent is, as is perfectly well known, a mere 
fraction of the charges incurred in this country. But the 
most important point in favour of the system of patents of 
the United States is what I must call its certainty or fixity. 
A. B. has invented, say, a new method of manufacturing 
soap ; he has paid his fees, and received the official document 
certifying his rights. From that moment to the expiry of 
the seventeen years the patent is his absolute property, unless 
of course it is set aside by the decision of a Court as being 
wanting in novelty, or as being an infringement of some 
prior patent. No act or omission on the part of the patentee 
can render his patent null and void. In the United Kingdom 
a totally different system prevails, to the disadvantage of the 
inventor. He is called upon to pay £50 at the end of the 
third year, and a further sum of £100 at the expiry of 
the seventh year, failing either of which sums the patent is 
forthwith void, and the invention becomes public property. 
Now the effects of such a system are self-evident. Every 
person who wishes to have the use of the process, and who 
otherwise would negotiate with the patentee for a license or 
for the purchase of his entire rights, is induced to wait, in 
the hope that the patentee may fail to pay the £50 duty at 
the end of the third year. This is especially certain if the 
inventor is known or suspedted to be poor, — a state of things 
far from uncommon, as his means are often much reduced 
by the cost of perhaps a prolonged course of experimenta- 
tion. Hence, therefore, capitalists have a distinct induce- 
ment given them to hold back, which in America does not 
exist. 
Now it has always been a mystery to me how it comes 
that genuine Patent-Law reformers — men who declare them- 
selves the friends and promoters of invention — do not per- 
ceive the necessary effects of this system of intermediate 
payments. So far are they, however, from recognising the 
vol. v. (third series.) c 
