to claim it as mainly due to those labors—­had been to propagate and spread abroad a fact and a feeling entirely opposed to the false doctrines previously current on the subject, namely, that among our most valuable laws were those which could excite the intelligence and reward the labors of the inventors of all nations.  There were still those who wished to see the patent laws swept away, but their numbers had dwindled into a miserable minority, composed mainly of manufacturers who were so curiously short-sighted as not to see that all improvement in manufactures must come from inventive talent, or those who, still more blind, could not perceive that property created by brains was certainly not a monopoly, and deserves protection quite as much as any other form of possession, in order that it may be developed by capital.  He need scarcely waste time in pointing out the fallacy of refusing to pay for the seed corn of industrial pursuits, for that fallacy, bit by bit, had been completely swept away, and last year the labors of the institute had been so far crowned with success that the President of the Board of Trade, in his place in Parliament, announced his conviction that “inventors were the creators of trade, and ought to be encouraged and not repressed.”  Such a conviction, forced home in such a quarter, ought to have produced a great and beneficial change in the legislation on the subject, and the hopes of inventors were that this would surely be the case; but when the bill appeared these hopes were considerably depressed, and now, after a year’s experience of the working of the changed law, scarcely any benefit appears to have been obtained, beyond the meager concession that the heavy payments demanded, for an English patent may be made in installments instead of lump sums.  Against this infinitesimal concession had to be set a number of disabilities which did not formerly exist, such as compulsory licenses, which disinclined the capitalist to invest in inventions, attempts to assimilate the provisional specification to the complete, or to restrict the latter within the terms of the former, attempts to separate the parts of an invention, and thus increase the number of patents required to protect it, and many other minor annoyances which would take too much time to explain fully.  It was true that there was some extension of the time for payment—­some such locus penitentiae as would be accorded to any debtor by any creditor in the hope of getting the assets; but the promised spirit of encouragement to inventors was not to be found in the bill; it was still a boon which must be earnestly sought by the institute.