It is beyond our province to consider the inquiries of M. le Hardy de Beaulieu as to the best plan of securing to inventors exclusive right in their discoveries. To take up this question is to undertake the discovery of the philosopher’s stone, or the squaring of the circle; several generations have vainly grappled with it, and the different attempts made without satisfactory results in almost every country prove this conclusively. But the honourable Professor seems to calculate on the improvement of public morals, in order to reach the point where every attempt against the property of the inventor shall be considered as guilty as robbery, or as any injury done to property existing in material shape. Under the uncompromising Protective system also it was attempted to improve the morals of the public, who would not see the equal guilt of the smuggler and the robber, and always loudly protested when repression was enforced by bloodshed. No reform of public morals will change the nature of these acts; they will always be received as the appeal of right against abuse; and we would deeply pity the country where it would be sufficient to say such is the law, and where no conscience might protest against it. XI. “Discovery, the appropriation and creation of outlets, is too complicated a work,” says M. le Hardy de Beaulieu, “for the inventor singly, and especially without the aid of capital, to undertake with sufficient chance of success.” Here again we believe the learned economist is in error; he seems to imagine one inventor arriving at perfection either at a jump, or after many attempts—one inventor giving us at once our ocean steamer, or a spinning-mill with a hundred thousand spindles! Inventions go more slowly; when they spring from the brain of the thinker, they are only sketches, and no man in his senses will risk a large capital before making many trials, and that only on a small scale. We do not believe there has been a single invention which, after numerous trials, has not been modified, improved, and perfected. And how many have at last been thrown into oblivion, from which they will never be recalled? Also, when we see the defenders of property in invention draw a sad picture of the piercing miseries which inventors of these last have had to endure, we are always tempted to ask them to show us the pitiful account of ruin caused among those who placed faith in their promises and delusions. Every medal has its reverse, and if more than one real inventor has been misunderstood, many of the too-confident have been victims of the mad and inapplicable ideas of inventors who imagined themselves men of genius. Is the law, which seems to promise an Eldorado to all inventors, to blame for these losses, for these undeserved sufferings?