Why is that so? It is so because from the foundation of the world until now there never was a nation and there never was a day when the idea of the continuity of private property was connected in the minds of men with intellectual productions. England has developed the idea of private property more fully than has any other nation; and England never ascribed the idea of the continuity of private property to any intellectual production, either for an invention or for a writing. To this day no man has a right in England to a patent on an invention, and never has had. The granting of any patent on an invention in England is dependent entirely upon the pleasure of Edward the Seventh; and the patents themselves, when granted, each one of them sets forth that fact, and states that Edward the Seventh thinks on the whole that it will benefit the realm to grant this patent, and proceeds to grant it. But if Edward the Seventh and those who represent him choose to decline to issue a patent in pursuance of any particular application they can do so in entire conformity with the laws of England. In respect to the protection of private property relevant to intellectual productions in the domain of books or musical compositions, this is the history in England: Prior to the time of Milton nobody had a right to publish anything in England without the permission of the Crown, and that permission was granted or refused, not with reference to the deserts or the merits of the author or the composer, but with reference to the opinion of the Crown as to whether or not the published thing would be beneficial or not beneficial to the public interests. And the Crown usually identified the public interests with the interests of the Crown, so that it suppressed what it desired to suppress and permitted to fly what it desired to be published. At the time of the Commonwealth publication became free and was free, but there was still no notion of any exclusive right to publish a particular literary or musical composition inhering in the author of that composition; and that right never did begin and never was heard of in England until the reign of Anne, when Parliament passed a statute establishing such a right for a limited time.