Towards the end of this famous case, the anti-McCormick lobby at the Capitol became so rabid that Senator Brown, of Mississippi, made an indignant protest on the floor of the Senate. He said: "Why, Mr. President, if it were not for the people out of doors, people without inventive genius, people without the genius to invent a mouse-trap or a fly-killer, who are pirating on the great invention of McCormick, there would never have been an hour's delay in granting all that he asks. I know, and I state here, in the face of the American Senate and the world, that these men have beset me at every corner of the street with their papers and their affidavits--men who have no claim to the ear of the country, men who have rendered it no service, but who have invested their paltry dollars in the production of a machine which sprang from the mind of another man; and who now, for their own gain, employ lawyers to draw cunning affidavits, to devise cunning schemes, and to put on foot all sorts of machinery to defeat McCormick." What worried McCormick most was not this consolidation of competitors, but the fact that a few farmers had signed petitions of protest against his claim. This was "the most unkindest cut of all." But he made no attack upon them. Manufacturers he would fight, and inventors and lawyers and judges--any one and every one, if need be, except farmers. "How can the farmers be against me?" he asked in amazement. "They save the price of the Reaper in a single harvest." McCormick lost his suit, as he did a second time in 1859, and a third time in 1861. Not one of his patents was at any time renewed. Up to 1858 he had received $40,000 in royalties, but it had cost him $90,000 in litigation. From first to last he did not get one dollar of net profit from the protection of the Patent Office. Many other inventors were fairly treated by Congress. Fulton, for example, was presented with a bonus of $76,300. Willmoth, who improved the turret of a battleship, received $50,000. Professor Page, for making an electric engine, was given $20,000. Morse was awarded $38,000. The patents of Goodyear, Kelly, Howe, Morse, Hyatt, Woodworth, and Blanchard were extended. The protection of inventors had been a national policy--an American tradition. In the phrasing of Daniel Webster: "The right of an inventor to his invention is a natural right, which existed before the Constitution was written and which is above the Constitution."