The Convention shrank from the insertion of a bill of rights in the Constitution because, as was subsequently explained, it was feared that it might bring up the subject of slavery, one member insisting that it should contain a declaration against slavery, and another that it should specifically declare that it did not extend to slaves. Accordingly the committee did not incorporate this declaration of right in their draught. But it is set forth in the Observations; and on the 20th of August Pinckney proposed in the Convention a stronger and more explicit provision. These provisions, therefore, are sustained by the public, contemporaneous avowal of Pinckney that they were in the draught which he had prepared for the use of the Convention; and by the recorded facts that when he found that the committee had not considered them as within their jurisdiction and had not incorporated them in their draught he brought them before the Convention and sought to have them inserted in the Constitution. As it is certain that the ideas were his, and that he formulated them into provisions substantially identical with those in the State Department draught, at the time when the Convention was considering the respective subjects, it requires very little additional assurance to make us accept them as a part of the draught presented to the Convention. Conversely, there are provisions which may have been in the draught presented to the Convention, but which are not in the draught filed in the State Department. The most notable of these is the one relating to patents and copyright. Pinckney says in the Observations "There is also an authority to the national legislature" "to secure to authors the exclusive right to their performances and discoveries;" and on the 18th of August he moved in the Convention to insert among other powers "To grant patents for useful inventions." If the provision was in the original draught, the Committee of Detail were not authorized to adopt it and did not; but the Convention did and it became a part of the Constitution. Pinckney was constantly nursing his draught, revising, amending, rearranging, and it is not improbable that he inserted this provision in one copy and neglected to insert it in the others. But he certainty seems to have been the author of it. From one point of view it may seem a needless Constitutional provision; for a national legislature could so legislate without it. But under the British Constitution monopolies were a prerogative of the Crown, and a patent was deemed a monopoly. Pinckney therefore did wisely in expressly assigning patent-rights and copyrights to the legislative branch of the Government, giving to the mind-work of the inventor or author the character of property and the safeguard of the law.