to develop, encourage, and maintain the zeal, devotion, and abilities of public servants, or are they calculated to repress or weaken them?
"When a man enters the Naval service, he without a doubt surrenders certain rights of the citizen; for instance, he cannot quit the country without leave; he cannot make certain bargains and contracts; and he is specially bound to render particular services which are determined by law, custom, and the usages of the sea. Though he has given up his energies, both of body and mind, for certain things, he has not given them up for everything. He gives them up so far as they are necessary to the performance of the recognized duties of his office. It is difficult, as we approach the ground where the line of duty begins or ends, to separate all the rights of the individual from the obligations of the officer. The exact limits of the line are obscure and uncertain.
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"So with the obligations of the officer and his private rights: they so overlap and blend in with each other, that as we approach the line where they pass into each other, it is difficult to mark it; but when we take the case of Whitney with his cotton gin, and Fulton with his steamboat, even though they had been Navy officers, there is no difficulty in comprehending the rights of the individual to his own discoveries. Neither is there, it is submitted, any difficulty in recognizing the rights of the author to the discovery which he has expanded out into the "Wind and Current Charts."
"It cannot be urged that, in giving form and expression to this chart idea, its author has done it at the expense of any other of the duties the Government had devolved upon him, for he has at the same time performed a class of duties that, in other services, are usually divided into three distinct departments, and which (as in England) are assigned each
