[198] In another letter Watt described himself as “worried by the Wheal Chanceians.... In short,” says he, “I am at this moment so provoked at the undeserved rancour with which we are persecuted in Cornwall, that, were it not on account of the deplorable state of debt I find myself in, I would live on bread and cheese, and suffer the water to run out at their adits, before I would relax the slightest iota of what I thought my right in their favour.”--Watt to Boulton, 17th October, 1780. Boulton MSS. But would Parliament really take away that right of property in the invention which they had granted, and deprive Watt and his partner of the fruits of their long labour and anxiety, and their heavy outlay, now that the superiority of the engine had become established? Would the legislature consign them to certain ruin because it would be for the advantage of the Cornish miners to have the use of the invention without paying for it? Watt would not for a moment believe this, and both he and Boulton felt strong in the conviction that their patent right would be maintained. Time was, when Watt would have gladly parted with his invention for a very small sum, and made the engine free to all, so far as he was concerned. Even after it had been perfected at Soho, after repeated and costly experiments, he declared his willingness to sell all his interest in it for 7000_l._, which would have barely remunerated him for the time and labour he had bestowed upon it, then extending over nearly twenty years of the best period of his life. And now, after six years of the partnership had run, and the heavy expenditure incurred by Boulton in introducing the engine was still unproductive, he regarded it as cruel in the extreme to attempt to deprive him of his just reward. To Boulton he disburdened himself fully, in strong and sometimes bitter terms. “They charge us,” he said, “with establishing a monopoly, but if a monopoly, it is one by means of which their mines are made more productive than ever they were before. Have we not given over to them two-thirds of the advantages derivable from its use in the saving of fuel, and reserved only one-third to ourselves, though even that has been still further reduced to meet the pressure of the times? They say it is inconvenient for the mining interest to be burdened with the payment of engine dues; just as it is inconvenient for the person who wishes to get at my purse that I should keep my breeches-pocket buttoned. It is doubtless also very inconvenient for the man who wishes to get a slice of the squire’s land, that there should be a law tying it up by an entail. Yet the squire’s land has not been of his own making, as the condensing engine has been of mine. He has only passively inherited his property, while this invention has been the product of my own labour, and of God knows how much anguish of mind and body;”--