An Inventors’ Institute has been formed for the purpose of maintaining the Patent System, and amending it in such a way as, I fear and am sure, will only make its yoke more galling and its burden heavier. The public will do well to remember that, in spite of the name, this is rather a society of patentees, including in its membership a portion only of those inventors who take Patents, and not including the innumerable inventors who do not take Patents, and who suffer by the system which the Institute is intended to perpetuate, extend, and knit more tightly on us all and in the first place on them. The honoured names who direct that society will do well to consider who are inventors and what are inventions. If they would but reflect that we are almost to a man inventors in the sense in which the great mass of patentees are such, and that the majority of inventions which choke the Patent-office are such as themselves, at any rate, would disdain to claim and scorn to annoy their fellows by patenting, they would probably arrive at the conviction—which is half-way on the road to complete emancipation of trade from the fetters they hug—that the system is so practically bad that rectification is hopeless, and would join in endeavours, not to amend what is, even theoretically, defective and bad, but to devise and introduce a thoroughly good substitute. I hope the present publication will not be in vain, when it endeavours to remove well-meaning prepossessions by force of truth. JUSTIFICATION OF STATE REWARDS. [Page 81.] It is just and expedient that the public exchequer should pay inventors, because—1. The State is entitled, or required, to undertake all beneficent and useful works which, while they ought to be done for or by the nation, yet cannot be so well, or at all, done by individuals. 2. Though individuals, more than the nation collectively, will reap the benefit of these payments, it is manifest that the range of inventive improvement is so wide that on the average of years every portion of the community, and every individual in all portions, will share the benefit pretty equally. 3. The demand for remunerating inventors proceeds from the State, not manufacturers or producers. 4. These last cannot, under the _régime_ of free trade, pass over from their own shoulders upon those of consumers—who are the real, because ultimate, recipients of the benefit—the burden of royalties, or other payments to inventors. 5. The charge of £200,000 per annum is, after all, on a population of thirty-two millions but a poll-tax of _three halfpence per head_. On how easy terms would we obtain for the nation a universal, prompt enjoyment of every novelty, and complete emancipation of our commerce and manufactures from an incubus and thraldom which are every day becoming more depressing! THE PATENT-OFFICE ESTABLISHMENT. [Page 86.]