“Thus, after four years of assiduous labor, fatigue, and difficulty, are we again set afloat by a new and most unexpected obstacle. Our hopes of success are now removed to a period still more distant than before, while our expenses are realized beyond all controversy.” The failure of that patent suit loosed all the pirates, and Whitney saw the cotton fields flooded with gins, all of which were really based on his invention, and yet from which he did not receive one penny. The public had given over paying any attention to his patents. Every one seemed determined that a machine which meant so much to the cotton lands should be free to all, irrespective of any legal or moral rights in the matter. Miller wrote him a little later, “The prospect of making anything by ginning in this state is at an end. Surreptitious gins are erected in every part of the country, and the jurymen at Augusta have come to an understanding among themselves that they will never give a cause in our favor, let the merits of the case be as they may.” [Illustration: WHITNEY, THE INVENTOR OF THE COTTON GIN] Affairs could not well have been worse for the partners. They would have been willing to give up making gins and devote themselves to selling the rights they had already obtained, but it was difficult to find purchasers for titles which were so openly disregarded on every hand. They found it almost impossible to collect payments for the few machines they did sell, the buyers preferring to be sued, trusting to a jury of their neighbors deciding for them against the unpopular manufacturers, who claimed to control such an important machine as the gin. Whitney tried to sell his patent rights for South Carolina to that state itself, and had the matter brought before the Legislature. It met with better success than usual. “I have been at this place,” he writes in a letter, “a little more than two weeks attending the Legislature. A few hours previous to their adjournment they voted to purchase for the state of South Carolina my patent-right to the machine for cleaning cotton at $50,000, of which sum $20,000 is to be paid in hand, and the remainder in three annual payments of $10,000 each.” To this he added, “We get but a song for it in comparison with the worth of the thing, but it is securing something. It will enable Miller & Whitney to pay their debts and divide something between them.”