There were still those who wished to see
the patent laws swept away, but their numbers had dwindled into a
miserable minority, composed mainly of manufacturers who were so curiously
short-sighted as not to see that all improvement in manufactures must come
from inventive talent, or those who, still more blind, could not perceive
that property created by brains was certainly not a monopoly, and deserves
protection quite as much as any other form of possession, in order that it
may be developed by capital. He need scarcely waste time in pointing out
the fallacy of refusing to pay for the seed corn of industrial pursuits,
for that fallacy, bit by bit, had been completely swept away, and last
year the labors of the institute had been so far crowned with success that
the President of the Board of Trade, in his place in Parliament, announced
his conviction that "inventors were the creators of trade, and ought to be
encouraged and not repressed." Such a conviction, forced home in such a
quarter, ought to have produced a great and beneficial change in the
legislation on the subject, and the hopes of inventors were that this
would surely be the case; but when the bill appeared these hopes were
considerably depressed, and now, after a year's experience of the working
of the changed law, scarcely any benefit appears to have been obtained,
beyond the meager concession that the heavy payments demanded, for an
English patent may be made in installments instead of lump sums.
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