The theory of the patent law is simple. The country is enriched by inventions and offers for them a small premium: this premium is a seventeen years' monopoly of their fruit - no more, no less. Having purchased the invention for this insignificant price, the purchase is consummated by the publication in the patent records of the details of the invention so that he who runs may read. The whole thing is a strictly business transaction, and this character is emphasized by the fact that the inventor is required to pay for the clerical and expert labor required to put his invention into shape for issuing. His patent fees are designed to cover this expense, and do so, with a considerable margin to spare. Thus the people of the United States are perpetually being enriched by the work of inventors, at absolutely no cost to themselves.

The inventor does not work for love nor for glory alone, but in the hopes of a return for his labor. Glory, and love of his species, are elements actuating his work, and in many cases he invents because he cannot help himself, because his genius is a hard task master and keeps him at work. But none the less, the great incitement to invention is the hope of obtaining a valuable patent, and without this inducement inventions would be few and far between, and America would, without the patent system, be far in arrears of the rest of the world, instead of leading it, as it does to-day. The few pregnant sentences of the patent statutes, Sentences the force of whose every word has been laboriously adjudicated by our highest tribunal, the Supreme Court of the United States, are responsible for America's most characteristic element of prosperity, the work of her inventors, to whom belongs the credit.