“the power of deciding whether an inventor should derive any pecuniary advantage for the public benefit which he confers, the objections are evidently [!] stronger and more fundamental than the strongest which can possibly be urged against Patents. It is generally admitted that the present Patent-Laws need much improvement.” It is not admitted that they can be made satisfactory, do what we will; and I contend that no extent of mere improvement can overcome the objectionableness of the restraints and burdens inseparable from the system. “But in this case, as well as in the closely analogous one of Copyright, it would be a gross immorality in the law to set everybody free”— Why, everybody is naturally free, and would continue free if the law did not step in and cruelly take their freedom away, doing which is the real immorality. “to use a person’s work”— A fallacy—to use, it may be, his thoughts, which, as soon as they are communicated, are no longer his only—and not at all to use his “work” in any proper sense. “without his consent, and without giving him an equivalent.” As if consent were needed to use one’s knowledge, and as if there could or should be any equivalent. “I have seen with real alarm several recent attempts, in quarters carrying some authority, to impugn the principle of Patents altogether; attempts which, if practically successful, would enthrone free stealing under the prostituted name of free trade, and make the men of brains, still more than at present, the needy retainers and dependents of the men of money-bags.” As to “free stealing,” hear what the greatest political economist of France thinks— “C’est dans une mesure la même question que le free trade.” As to the “money-bags,” Mr. Mill plainly is not aware that the dependence he deprecates is the invariable, almost the inevitable, consequence of a Patent system.