The extracts which I have culled sufficiently prove that, in the opinion of men selected because they were competent to speak with authority on account of their character, ability, and experience, our Patent system is “generally inconvenient” and is “hurtful to trade.” Being so, it is inconsistent with the conditions on faith of which, while other monopolies were prohibited by the Act, it was spared. But I rest my case on absolute evils, without regard to that inconsistency. I am sure nobody can go over the evidence as a whole, or even those scraps of evidence which I have presented—I am well aware in a very promiscuous and ineffective manner—without becoming convinced that the trade and manufactures of this country are seriously obstructed, fettered, retarded, harassed, and burdened, sometimes demoralised, often wronged, or even robbed, by the multitude and vexatious character of Patents, and by the claims and conduct of patentees;—that these Patents, though very numerous, in general possess little merit, yet often produce large revenues, the result of exactions from persons who use them, to the assignees, rather than to the original grantees,—that the uncertainty of receiving a good return (in place of which experience shows there is, in most cases, disappointment or even positive loss), and the utter incongruity existing between the earnings, where there are any, and the merits of inventions, render the system of Patents an exceedingly unsatisfactory way of stimulating invention or rewarding inventors;—and that there is wide-spread dissatisfaction with things as they are, yet despair of amendment, among the most intelligent of those portions of the community for whose benefit the system is plausibly represented to exist. The evidence goes to show that the poor man and the working man suffer in two ways. Such cannot bring their inventions into play for want of capital, and they could not, even if it were in that respect different, make head against rich infringers who are able by the costliness of law proceedings to set them at defiance. I might allege, also, that while the expenses of patenting are clearly too heavy to suit the circumstances of the poor, there is little or no favour shown by any influential witnesses to propositions for reducing them, because of the tendency that a suitable reduction would have to still further multiply Patents. Surely this indicates sufficiently that there is something radically wrong in the principle on which we proceed.