How did you fail to see that, without a guarantee of the invention, you conceded a privilege, not for a real discovery, but for a possible discovery, and that thus the field of industry was given up by you before the plough was found? Certainly, your duty bade you to be prudent; but who gave you a commission to be dupes?
Thus the patent for invention is not even the fixing of a date; it is an abandonment in anticipation.It is as if the law should say: "I assure the land to the first occupant, but without guaranteeing its quality, its location, or even its existence; not even knowing whether I ought to give it up or that it falls within the domain of appropriation!" A pretty use of the legislative power!
I know that the law had excellent reasons for abstaining; but I maintain that it also had good reasons for intervening.Proof:
"It cannot be concealed," says M.Renouard, "it cannot be prevented;
patents are and will be instruments of quackery as well as a legitimate reward of labor and genius....It is for the good sense of the public to do justice to juggleries."
As well say it is for the good sense of the public to distinguish true remedies from false, pure wine from adulterated; or, it is for the good sense of the public to distinguish in a buttonhole the decoration awarded to merit from that prostituted to mediocrity and intrigue.Why, then, do you call yourselves the State, Power, Authority, Police, if the work of Police must be performed by the good sense of the public?
As the proverb says, he who owns land must defend it; likewise, he who holds a privilege is liable to attack.
Well! how will you judge the counterfeit, if you have no guarantee?
In vain will they offer you the plea: in right first occupancy, in fact similarity.Where reality depends upon quality, not to demand a guarantee is to grant no right over anything, is to take away the means of comparing processes and identifying the counterfeit.In the matter of industrial processes success depends upon such trifles! Now, these trifles are the whole.
I infer from all this that the law regarding patents for inventions, indispensable so far as its motives are concerned, is impossible -- that is, illogical, arbitrary, disastrous -- in its economy.Under the control of certain necessities the legislator has thought best, in the general interest, to grant a privilege for a definite thing; and he finds that he has given a signature-in-blank to monopoly, that he has abandoned the chances which the public had of making the discovery or some other similar to it, that he has sacrificed the rights of competitors without compensation, and abandoned the good faith of defenceless consumers to the greed of quacks.
Then, in order that nothing might be lacking to the absurdity of the contract, he has said to those whom he ought to guarantee: "Guarantee yourselves!"
I do not believe, any more than M.Renouard, that the legislators of all ages and all countries have wilfully committed robbery in sanctioning the various monopolies which are pivotal in public economy.But M.Renouard might well also agree with me that the legislators of all ages and all countries have never understood at all their own decrees.A deaf and blind man once learned to ring the village bells and wind the village clock.
It was fortunate for him, in performing his bell-ringer's functions, that neither the noise of the bells nor the height of the bell-tower made him dizzy.The legislators of all ages and all countries, for whom I profess, with M.Renouard, the profoundest respect, resemble that blind and deaf man; they are the Jacks-in-the-clock- house of all human follies.
What a feather it would be in my cap if I should succeed in making these automata reflect! if I could make them understand that their work is a Penelope's web, which they are condemned to unravel at one end as fast as they weave at the other!
Thus, while applauding the creation of patents, on other points they demand the abolition of privileges, and always with the same pride, the same satisfaction.M.Horace Say wishes trade in meat to be free.Among other reasons he puts forward this strictly mathematical argument:
The butcher who wants to retire from business seeks a purchaser for his investment; he figures in the account his tools, his merchandise, his reputation, and his custom; but under the present system, he adds to these the value of the bare title, -- that is, the right to share in a monopoly.
Now, this supplementary capital which the purchasing butcher gives for the title bears interest; it is not a new creation; this interest must enter into the price of his meat.Hence the limitation of the number of butchers' stalls has a tendency to raise the price of meat rather than lower it.
I do not fear to affirm incidentally that what I have just said about the sale of a butcher's stall applies to every charge whatever having a salable title.
M.Horace Say's reasons for the abolition of the butcher's privilege are unanswerable; moreover, they apply to printers, notaries, attorneys, process- servers, clerks of courts, auctioneers, brokers, dealers in stocks, druggists, and others, as well as to butchers.But they do not destroy the reasons which have led to the adoption of these monopolies, and which are generally deduced from the need of security, authenticity, and regularity in business, as well as from the interests of commerce and the public health.
The object, you say, is not attained.My God! I know it: leave the butcher's trade to competition, and you will eat carrion; establish a monopoly in the butcher's trade, and you will eat carrion.That is the only fruit you can hope for from your monopoly and patent legislation.
Abuses! cry the protective economists.Establish over commerce a supervisory police, make trade-marks obligatory, punish the adulteration of products, etc.
