Invention was an ennobling pursuit, and was, even among those who were not also handworkers, a means of employment which never left dull or idle hours, while to the handworker it meant more, for it offered the most ready means of rising among his fellows, and, where invention received proper protection, of securing a competence for old age or ill health. Not only, as he had before said, did the results of invention cause no loss to any other individual, unless by displacing inferior methods of working, but in most instances some distinct benefit arose to the whole human race, and unless this was the case the patented invention failed to obtain recognition, soon died out, and left the field clear for others to occupy. He regretted that so few results had been obtained from the Patent Bill of last year, but he would briefly refer to some of the changes thought desirable by inventors and by the council of the institute. No one could deem it desirable, it could scarcely be thought reasonable, that an Englishman who was called upon to pay in the United States £7 for a valid patent for seventeen years should be still obliged in his own country to pay £175 for a less term of a patent which does not convey anything but a right to go to law. It was also not reasonable to pretend by a deed to convey a proprietary right while reserving the power to grant compulsory licenses, which must tend to destroy the value of such proprietary right. It was a reproach to legislative perspicacity that the grantee of a patent should be obliged to accept the view of the state, the grantor, as to the value of the invention to the nation, and also that any other method of proceeding to upset a patent, once granted, should be allowed than a suit for revocation to the crown, on the ground of error, such revocation if obtained not to prejudice the granting anew, with the old date, of a valid patent for the parts of the invention which are not proved to be anticipated at the trial. There are many other points which could not be referred to on the present occasion, but he might say that the duty of the council would be to press them forward until the capitalist could consider patented property at least as sound an investment as any other. So might the wealth of the nation be largely increased, and the sense of justice between man and man be more fully inculcated. In the United States inventors were able at once to secure the favorable attention of capitalists, because there the whole business of the Patent Office was to assist the inventor to obtain a valid--and, as far as possible, an indisputable--patent.