“To require that an idea be subject to only one will,” continues M. Walkoff, “is to require no less an impossibility than to pretend that a material point can obey more than one will—that is to say, that it can be moved in more than one direction at once. It is true that it is not proposed to hinder ideas from being developed; it is desired simply to convert their reproduction or their material realisation into an indefinitely prolonged monopoly. But, in order completely to succeed in anything, it is necessary that the object aimed at be in conformity with the nature of things. Now, is it not placing oneself in opposition to everything which is most natural, this denying to every one the use of an idea? And even where this interdict is most successful, we soon find, in a manner most unassailable by the law, works copied from those to which the law has guaranteed a monopoly. The effect of the interdict is here, as in all regulations contrary to the nature of things, essentially demoralising; it begets fraud, entices to it, even forces to it, in making it useful and often even indispensable. Forbid men, as was once supposed by the witty author of the ‘Sophismes Economiques,’ the use of the right hand, after a few hours, there would not remain, in the eye of the law, a single honest man. It may be boldly affirmed that such a law would be immoral, and all those which recklessly contradict the natural order of things are incontestably such.” In fact, we repeat, the field which I turned into a garden may not be used by my neighbour as a pasture-land for his cattle; where I have planted a vine another may not plant colza or beet-root; but the steam-engine which I have invented, or the electric power which I have discovered, may be applied to the grinding of corn, or the spinning of cotton, or to the extraction of iron, or to the draining of a marsh, or to traction by land or sea, without the productive force being neutralised, wasted, or lost, like the application of the productive force of the soil to different purposes. Not only do the various applications of the idea not hinder the inventor in the employment which he may make of it, but if the application made by others is exactly the same as his, he is only subjected to the universal law of competition—a law of progress, if ever there was one. [4] Precis d’Economic Politique Rationale, page 44; Paris, 1868. II. The Hon. M. le Hardy de Beaulieu asks, “Why the effort which consists in rendering productive some natural agent in which this quality was not formerly recognised, should not entitle to a recompense of property in the value given to the natural agent in rendering it productive, in the same way that labour bestowed on barren land to render it productive, to the profit of all, makes him proprietor of that portion of land who performed this labour?”