which were useful to the public service. But that, he conceived, would be a very different thing from an organised system of rewards at all analogous to the present system of Patents. He might mention, in passing, a third plan, which had found very able and authoritative advocates, and which he should also greatly prefer to the present system, although he thought total abolition would be better than that likewise. He referred to the plan of putting an end to the notion that every person who invented anything had a right to a Patent, and recurring to what, he imagined, was originally the principle intended—namely, the giving of Patents as a matter of grace and favour in well-selected and discriminated cases, in the exercise of a discretion by an authority entrusted with that discretion. But, as he had already said, he confessed that he himself was not for half measures in that matter. He thought they had a right, as the motion proposed, to say that at the period of progress in the history of the arts and of trade in this country at which they had arrived, they could do much better without these props. He called them props because he thought they were meant to be so, but he believed that at present they were nothing but obstructions and hindrances to trade and the arts. Let him, in the first place, notice the principle on which the Patent-Law was generally supported. Some persons imagined that there was a sort of either moral or natural right in inventors to some such protection as was given by Patents, and the principle was sometimes expressed in this way—that a man had a right to the fruit of his brain. Now, he held that invention and discovery were essentially unlike Copyright. Copyright applied to a creation: a man wrote a book; he thus brought into existence something which had no existence in the nature of things before. The rest of the world were not in the race with him to write that particular book. But in the case of inventions and discoveries, the facts with which they were concerned lay in Nature itself, and all mankind who were engaged in pursuits which gave them an interest in the investigation for practical purposes of the laws of Nature, had an equal right of access to the knowledge of those laws and might be equally in the track for obtaining it. All who were engaged in particular arts and manufactures were actually upon the track which led to the discovery of the useful application of those laws; and the knowledge of them was the common stock and property of all mankind who were equally in pursuit of it. He could not allow that the man who was first in the race of discovery could claim for fourteen years, or any other term, an exclusive property in a portion of the common stock of knowledge which was accessible to all who used the proper means of discovering it. It could not be said that on any considerations except those of public advantage and expediency the man