The merit and novelty of the invention might in many cases be almost nothing, and, yet however obvious it might be, however much it might lie, so to speak, in the high road of discovery, if it applied to any article of general use, the pecuniary reward derived from it might be absolutely out of proportion to the novelty or value of the invention. It would be easy to give instances, but he apprehended that the fact was familiar to every one who had studied this question. Then, with regard to the injury to third parties, it commonly happened that half-a-dozen men who were competing in the same line of business were upon the track of the same discovery. Each of these half-a-dozen men would probably have hit upon the invention which was wanted, independently and without communication with the other. But the first who hit upon it, and who took out a Patent for it, was thereby entitled to exclude the general public and competitors from the use of that which, if he had never existed, they would probably have hit upon within a few weeks. A and B reached the same point, one a week or a fortnight before the other, and A became entitled, by the mere accident of such priority, to exclude B from a process which, a little later on, B would have hit upon for himself. Another case was that where the successful working of a process depended not upon one, but upon several successive inventions. The first two or three, not leading to any immediate practical result, might not have been thought worth patenting. The last link in the chain gave to the whole their commercial value, and it was the person who took out the Patent for the last invention who got the benefit of the whole, yet it might not be the most important invention in the series. He would say nothing of the inconvenience and prejudice to manufacturers in general. That was obvious enough, and the question was whether there was any counterbalancing advantage. These were the considerations which led him to the conclusion that it was impossible to defend our system of Patent-Law as it stood. At the same time, he did not at all disguise from the House that there were certain inconveniences and difficulties in the way of abolishing Patents altogether. You had to guard, in the first place, against the danger of encouraging inventors to keep their discoveries entirely to themselves. In some branches of business, no doubt, that would be possible, and the obvious effect might be to shut out the public, for a much longer period than would be the case if Patents were allowed, from the use of some valuable invention. Then it had been suggested by the honourable member who raised this debate that there might be a system of State rewards for the encouragement of really meritorious inventions. Without putting an absolute negative on that plan, he must observe that it was one which could only be established at great cost, and it would be a very difficult thing to apportion among