But the public is not the only sufferer by Patent-right. Without doubt the heaviest evil falls on the patentee. The inventor is led to give an excessive development to his talent, and is seduced into reliance on a law that can give him no substantial protection. The difficulty of defining original inventions is a practical bar to a satisfactory Patent-Law. The whole history of Patents is a long-continued story of litigation and disappointment; and the more admirable the invention, the greater is the certainty of difficulty and loss. It must be a worthless invention that the patentee is left to enjoy in peace. Whenever a Patent is worth pirating, the inventor may depend on being involved in a maze of litigation that disturbs his peace and ruins his fortunes. And the more the Patent privilege is extended, the worse the evil becomes; the intricacy and the multiplicity of details baffling every attempt to define the rights of competing inventors. At this moment the heaviest complaints against Patents come from our great inventors. They repudiate the proffered privilege as “injurious to inventors,” and complain of being “borne down by an excess of protection.” As is natural, they who are most occupied with the advancement of invention, feel most acutely the grievous obstructiveness of the Patent-Law. Not enough that they have to battle with natural difficulties; at every step they meet obstructions which a well-meaning but perverse law places in their way. Nor do these obstructive privileges confer any real advantage on the empty schemers whose monopoly they establish: they merely give them the vexatious power of hindering the progress of better men. The mere “pen-and-ink inventor” has neither the energy, nor the perseverance, nor the practical ability to mature his crude “idea;” but to this man the law awards the dog-in-the-manger privilege of effectually obstructing the natural progress of practical improvement. These practical evils the advocates of Patent-Law do not deny; but they attribute them to the defective execution of the law, not to its vicious principle. Hence a never-ending cry, as in the case of all bad laws, for more legislation, for more stringent regulation, for stricter investigation, and more thorough registration of Patents. But no tinkering at details can avail. The whole system is radically unsound; and the only effectual remedy is to lay the axe to the root.