I have endeavoured to show what I believe to be true—that Parliament, when it, by the Act 21, Jas., 3, tolerated monopolies for inventions, did not sanction any system at all like that into which Patents have developed, or degenerated; that, in defiance of the Act, Patents are granted so as to create the evils which Parliament expressly sought to shield the nation from; that recent legislation has aggravated the great evils that pre-existed; that a Commission has satisfied itself that no radical or sufficient remedy can be applied; that the arguments of the defenders of Patent monopolies are untenable; that the most eminent statesmen, lawyers, engineers, manufacturers, and philosophers plead for abolition; that the State is at liberty, and has the power, to devise, if it wills, a better method of dealing with inventions, but that such a method must be one that leaves manufacturers free, and able to compete with continental rivals by at once adopting, without any burden of royalties, every most recent improvement. To conclude: this great and vital question cannot longer be deferred. It must be taken up, and that early, by what is expected to be a working Parliament—a Parliament, too, which for the first time can claim to represent labour and operative industry. Parliament has legislated in order to the preservation of salmon, and required the removal of obstacles on the coasts and in the rivers. Here are far worse obstacles, affecting not a luxury, but all our necessaries of existence, and every means of earning a livelihood. Again: are we not asked to remove light-dues at the sea and tolls on the land? But what are these unimportant, sparse, and withal equitable taxes, compared with the close-recurring stoppage and the indefinite and heavy demands for questionable “service” which Patents constitute? Yet, again: By arrangement with France we recently abolished the time-sanctioned petty exemptions of free-men; but here we are continuing to levy more burdensome private taxes, with exemptions in favour of foreigners! It is they, indeed, whom the provisions of the Patent-Law strangely serve. Foreign countries are not so liberal to British subjects as we are to theirs;—why should they? The number of Patents we grant in a year to foreigners has increased within a short period tenfold—to about 880, or about twelve times the whole number that Prussia grants to her own subjects and all the world besides. Well may Sir William Armstrong remark in his evidence:— “Unless you wish to benefit the foreigner, unless that be the sole object, as a matter of policy, I do not see what the motive to apply the Patent system is.” The same witness said also:—