to the morality of the question. Our House of Lords is quite as moral as any institution of our American cousins, and it is probable that for the first time the question will be argued on its merits, and not upon the technicalities of routine. The part that an inventor plays in national progress will be taken into the account, and his services will not be measured at the rate of a foreman or inspector in a national dockyard or arsenal, or any other of the underpaid classes of public servants.
Rightly understood, this question of recompense to inventors is of the deepest national importance; and by the term inventors I do not mean merely machinists or chemists, but the general body of original-minded men who really create national progress—who are the chiefs and leaders marshalling the works of those following.
This England of ours stands out from amidst Continental troubles, in virtue of the fact that more than in any other country all men are equal before the law. Every man, according to his faculties, may rise by industry and perseverance; and if genius, perseverance, and favourable circumstances meet together, a day labourer may attain to any position under the Crown. In virtue of this conviction, all men are contented, because the door is opened for bettering their position, and lord and lout dwell together in harmony, and the lout is content, having few aspirations. But amongst the mass of both are to be found many individuals with high instinctive genius and original powers. These men look round the world and find that nearly all matter possesses owners, land and water, and bird and beast, and fish, and tree and plant, and minerals. Air and ocean alone are free to all. In their teeming brains they behold new powers into which matter may be shaped, new combinations of choice art; but the materials on which they must work are not theirs, and if they give forth their knowledge the holders of the materials will alone benefit by the wonder-working brain. The lord of the soil would be the lord of all things, and the owner of the originating brain would be only a slave. Bethlem Gabor imprisoning the alchemist, in the romance of St. Leon, was a type of this condition.
Had this condition of things existed in England, one of two things must have resulted. Either the men of brains would have tried conclusions with the lords of the soil, by incessant revolutions, or England would have remained in a condition of non-progress, to be appropriated by successive invaders.
Fortunately English rulers and law-makers understood this, and laws were made giving men a limited property in their inventions, in consideration of their promulgating them. It is true that the inventor had to pay black mail to the king for the time being, but genius thus obtained its fulcrum, and national progress followed. The prosperous inventor obtained the means of purchasing the land of the spendthrift, and founding a name.
Of late years there has been a disposition in England to decry patents, the decriers being in almost all cases rich men—capitalists desirous of obtaining the use of other men’s brains gratuitously. Could they be successful in taking away copyright from authors, and property in mind from inventors, it would simply be a one-sided socialism. Those who found their brains turned into common property would be apt to institute an inquiry why land and capital of all kinds should not be common property also, and if defeated in this, they would, as far as practicable, emigrate to other lands, where the rights of their brains might be respected; and the glory of England would have departed. If a simple sewing-machine produces fifty-eight millions per annum in the United States, what must be its value here? And what is the annual value of the steam engines, steam vessels, iron rails, iron ships, power looms, and innumerable other things that have been called into existence by the stimulus of patents?
But it may be argued, if this were to go on, patentees would absorb all the wealth of the country. Successful inventors would possess the largest resources in the realm. But, also, they would be the most enterprising. They would expend the wealth acquired by one invention by working out new inventions without end. Progress is kept back chiefly by the poverty of inventors, and the loss of time they undergo in hunting up unwilling and incredulous capitalists.
There are people, and they are numerous, who have an idea that inventors are a thoughtless, wasteful race, who throw away their own property and that of their neighbours in absurd schemes. No doubt, there are numbers of these imaginative schemers, without judgment: but what then? In other departments of life we have unsuccessful merchants, and quack doctors, and mock musicians, and mechanical poets, and pretenders of all sorts; and why should the realm of mechanical invention be without them? The fact remains the same, that this our England waged a contest of years against the whole continent of Europe banded under the elder Napoleon, and came off victorious, the cost being mainly contributed from the earnings of the steam-engine, and spinning machinery, and power looms, and other appliances. It was Watt, and Crompton, and Hargraves, and such men, the never wearying inventors, who were at the root of the winning of this great fight, in the service of humanity, pulling down the false prophet who broke down old despotisms to make a worse despotism of his own.
Under heavy discouragements have they all wrought. Watt, but for the exceptional renewal of his patent when stricken in years, would have died a pauper. But for the wealth and recognition of Boulton, the thought of his brain would never have grown to be the work of the hand, and Watt would have perished, if not unnoticed and unknown with, at best, the reputation of a “schemer,”—the general term of reproach for unsuccessful promulgators of new plans, whatever be the merits of the plans themselves.
Time was, that inventors holding patents were regarded as public enemies, and every judge on the bench thought it a triumph when a patent was overthrown. They have lived through this, but the community owes them yet a larger measure of justice—a law court of their own, in which rapid and cheap justice may be done, in which patents may be declared valid, or overthrown, without the law’s delay, as now practised; in which