and has emboldened our legislators and financiers to make treaties, in which we consent, as a nation, to run the race of manufacturing industry weighted. The wise will call this _im_policy, perhaps _conceit_. Let us not deceive ourselves; peculiar burdens on British traders are incompatible with free-trade; more, and worse, they are flagrant inconsistencies, subversive of our character for good sense, incompatible with reasonable ground for expecting manufacturing prosperity. The cry and principle so popular this day is belied when there is not a fair field, and there is the opposite of favour. The cause of all these evils and wrongs is the sticking to the exploded and illogical system of monopoly, as if that were the best, instead of being, as we believe, the very worst form in which acknowledgment can be made. We say enough in condemnation when we characterise it as _despotic_, inasmuch as it hands over British manufacturers, absolutely and without appeal, to the exactions or prohibitions of patentees and assignees of Patents; as _erratic_, inasmuch as in one case it occasions not gain but loss to the favourite, in another it overpowers with enormous profit, frequently the ill-luck falling to the most ingenious, and the extravagant remuneration to men of slender claims; as _retarding_, inasmuch as it often causes great delay in the introducing of inventions into use; as _preposterous_, inasmuch as it hinders the perfecting of new inventions by preventing the combination of the further improvements that others than the patentee devise or might devise; as _illogical_, in this among other respects, that through the far larger share which capitalists or purchasers of Patents often get beyond the pittance that may or may not reach the poor inventor, its action is but indirect and small compared with its cost as a means of rewarding and stimulating inventors; as _inquisitorial_, for it justifies the hiring of informers to report who and where are infringers; as _unnatural_, for it takes away a person’s attention from his own legitimate business, and divides it with the businesses of other people whom he must watch or teach; as _cruel_, for the unhappy patentee is continually liable to be engaged in costly, often ruinous law pleas, far away from home, in order to establish the validity of his Patent and to prevent infringements; as _extravagant_, because it gives patentees, or rather costs the public (for it is but a small proportion of the burden imposed that is the nett profit of the patentee) much more than a better system would. It is also _partial_, as has been stated, for its incidence is not equal on all British manufacturers, and it inflicts on them the hardship of peculiar burdens not borne by rivals abroad; and in this respect, as in the rest, it is _irremediable_, for equal treatment is morally impossible at home and abroad. It is quite out of the question to expect rectifying amendment in this particular, seeing only some