object, the disadvantages preponderate over the advantages. We connect this charge with another which is still more condemnatory, viz., that these advantages, limited as they are, are obtained by compromise of sound principle and by positive acts of unfairness, such as cannot be alleged against our view of the case, which is, that these exclusive privileges should be abolished. The title of this paper says almost all I care to occupy your valuable time with. It speaks of _restrictions_ in the use of inventions. Patents impose restrictions, nay, prohibitions. They give an absolute monopoly. Nobody but a patentee has a right to use a patented invention. It speaks of _long_ restrictions. Patents impose their restrictions, or rather prohibitions, for the long period of fourteen years, with occasional prolongations of the term. To be denied the use of an invention for such a length of time is, now-a-days (whatever it may have been of yore), much like being denied it altogether. The title speaks of _payments_ to patentees. These are made in all cases where the patentee allows others to use his invention. It speaks of _heavy_ payments, because he has the right to make them heavy, and he, in practice, makes them as heavy as he can. It speaks of an _obligation_, and rightly, because a manufacturer who uses a patented invention is under the necessity to pay whatever the patentee demands or a jury awards, and competition may frequently compel him to use it, under penalty of losing his profits of trade, or his trade itself. It speaks of the payees as _patentees_, not as inventors; because in many cases (how large a proportion I cannot say) the rights are conferred on mere importers or appropriators of other people’s inventions. The title further speaks of _free-trade_. This freedom, which is something different from mere _libre échange_, ought to extend to manufacturing and all kind of labour, as well as to commerce, for, according to the great lexicographer, trade is “employment, whether _manual_ or mercantile.” Of course it does not so extend when labour is not free, but restricted and burdened. And it speaks of _fair_ trade—fairness is about as important as freedom. Will anybody say it is fair to tax one manufacturer and let another go free? Yet this is what Patents do. Those whom the patentee favours, or fears, or forgets, he does not tax, or taxes lightly, while on others he lays a heavy hand. But, worst of all, under the open competition to which the British manufacturer is now exposed with all the world, he often has to pay heavy Patent fees—often four, and sometimes, as I know, five, and even six, figures deep—while his foreign rivals wholly escape. How can any statesman, or member of a Chamber of Commerce, defend or palliate such gross and grievous inequalities? Unfortunately, the start that the United Kingdom has got in manufactures and shipping has done much to blind us, and keep us from seeing the strides that neighbouring nations are making,