“We are an inventive people. Invention is by no means confined to our mechanics. Our merchants invent, our soldiers and our sailors invent, our school-masters invent, our professional men invent, aye, our women and children invent. One man, lately, wished to patent the application of the Lord’s Prayer, repeated in a loud tone of voice, to prevent stammering; another claimed the new and useful attachment of a weight to a cow’s tail, to prevent her from switching it while milking; another proposed to cure worms by extracting by a delicate line and tiny hook, baited with a seductive pill; while a lady patented a crimping-pin, which she declared might also be used as a paper-cutter, as a skirt-supporter, as a paper-file, as a child’s pin, as a bouquet-holder, as a shawl-fastener, or as a book-mark. Do not suppose that this is the highest flight that the gentle sex has achieved. It has obtained many other patents, some of which have no relation to wearing apparel, and are of considerable value. “Every inventor supposes that he has a fortune in every conception that he puts into wood and iron. Stealing tremblingly and furtively up the steps of the Patent Office, with his model concealed under his coat, lest some sharper shall see it and rob him of his darling thought, he hopes to come down those steps with the precious parchment that shall insure him a present competency and enrich his children. If he were offered a million in the first flush of his triumph, he would hesitate about touching it without sleeping over it for a night. Yet fourteen thousand millions would be a pretty heavy bill to pay from a treasury not over full. No commission could satisfy the inventor, and no price that we could afford to pay would take the place of the hope of unlimited wealth, which now lightens his toil.... We say, we cannot pay you in money, we will pay you in time. A new thought developed, explained, described, put on record for the use of the nation—this is the one side. The right to the exclusive benefit of this new thought, for a limited time, and protection in that right, this on the other. This is the patent system. A fair contract between the inventor and the public. “The inventor’s best security is to take out a patent. “To secure this fair dealing, we have on the one side the Patent Office, with its examiners, its drawings, its models, its books and its foreign patents, to scan and test the invention.