“The man who first made a hut,” says M. le Hardy de Beaulieu, “a piece of furniture, a cloak, or some necessary of life, would no doubt have thereby excited the envy of his neighbours, and he would frequently have been deprived of these objects by violence or by strategy, before it would be generally allowed that they ought to belong to him who made them, and that it was at once the duty and the interest of the community to guarantee him their possession against every attack.” We acknowledge that the man who first constructed a hut was perfectly right in making good his claim against those who would have deprived him of it, and that he was justified in vindicating his claim by force. He had employed his time and strength in building this hut; it was undoubtedly his, and his neighbours acted up to their natural right and in their own interests in helping him to oppose the intruder. But there ended both the right of the individual and that of the community. If this first man, not content with claiming his hut, had pretended that the idea of building it belonged exclusively to him, and that consequently no other human being had a right to build a similar one, the neighbours would have revolted against so monstrous a pretension, and would never have allowed so mischievous an extension of the right which he had in the produce of his labour. Nevertheless, this man had exercised imagination and combination; he had invented the shape, the size, and the arrangement of the whole structure; he was the first to conceive—probably after many efforts of mind and thought, after long study, after observations made on the nests of birds and the hut of the beaver—that pile of branches, of dead wood, of leaves and of stones, of which its shelter is formed. He was an inventor of the first class. How is it, then, that the sentiment of justice which prompted him to claim his property did not prompt him at the same time to claim exclusive possession in the idea, the result of a long train of reflection? How is it that the same sentiment of justice which induced his neighbours, the community, to lend him armed force to preserve for him the possession of his hut, did not go so far as to grant him a property in his idea? No one dreamed of asking him for the permission to imitate what he had made; no one thought he was committing a crime, or doing him a wrong, in making a copy of his hut. Property can be a right only when its principles tend to the general good and are useful in advancing the interests of the human race. And if, in our day, imitation of an invention is not generally considered as guilty an act as robbery of tangible property, it is because every one understands the difference between an idea and a thing made or done.