§ 2.

That a man’s right to the produce of his brain is equally valid with his right to the produce of his hands, is a fact which has yet obtained but a very imperfect recognition. It is true that we have patent laws, a law of copyright, and acts for the registration of designs; but these, or at any rate two of them, have been enacted not so much in obedience to the dictates of justice, as in deference to the suggestions of trade policy.—A patent is not a thing which can be claimed as a right,—we are told by legal authorities, but is intended to—act as a stimulus to industry and talent.—It is not because the piracy of patterns would be wrong that legislators forbid it, but because they wish to afford—encouragement to manufactures.—Similar also are the current opinions. Measures of this nature are commonly considered by the public as giving to inventors a certain—privilege,—a—reward,—a sort of modified—monopoly.—It is on the ground of commercial statesmanship that they are approved; and not as being necessary for the administration of justice.

The prevalence of such a belief is by no means creditable to the national conscience, and indicates a sad bluntness of moral feeling. To think that the profits which a speculator makes by a rise in the share-market, should be recognised as legally and equitably his property, and yet that some new combination of ideas, which it may have cost an ingenious man years of application to complete, cannot be—claimed as a right—by that man! To think that a sinecurist should be held to have a—vested interest—in his office, and a just title to compensation if it is abolished, and yet that an invention over which no end of mental toil has been spent, and on which the poor mechanic has laid out perhaps his last sixpence—an invention which he has completed entirely by his own labour and with his own materials—has wrought, as it were, out of the very substance of his own mind—should not be acknowledged Edition: current; Page: [138] as his property! To think that his title to it should be admitted merely as a matter of convenience—admitted even then only on payment of some £400—and, after all, quashed on the most trifling pretences! What a thick-skinned perception of justice does this show! What a want of ability to appreciate matters at all removed beyond the sphere of the external senses! One would think that equity afforded no guidance beyond transactions in material things—weights, measures, and money. Let a shop-boy take from his master’s till a visible, tangible, ponderable sovereign, and all can see that the rights of ownership have been violated. Yet those who exclaim with such indignant virtue against theft, will purchase a pirated edition of a book, without any qualms of conscience concerning the receipt of stolen goods. Dishonesty, when shown in house-breaking or sheep-stealing, is held up to eternal infamy, and those convicted of it are for ever excluded from society; but the manufacturer who steals his foreman’s improved plan for the spinning of cotton, or the building of steam engines, continues to be held in high respect. The law is active enough in apprehending the urchin who may have deprived some comfortable citizen of his pocket-handkerchief, and will deal with the young scapegrace at the public expense; but there is no redress for the poverty-stricken schemer who is robbed by some wealthy scamp of that which formed the sole hope of his life. Strong illustrations these of the fact, that the moral sense, when unguided by systematic deduction, fails to find its way through the labyrinth of confused opinion, to a correct code of duty.