VIII.
The honourable Belgian economist next combats the opinion of those who, struck by the numerous and weighty inconveniences presented by the Patent-Laws, and their extreme diversitude in every country, have imagined a remedy in the expropriation of invention for the public good.
We shall be far from attaining our object if the reader has not already understood that, renouncing all idea of property as applied to manufacture, we shall not discuss this phase of the question. We will say, however, that we must protest with all our might against the following principle, expressed by M. le Hardy de Beaulieu: “Neither can we admit,” says he “the justice of expropriation for the public good so far as it concerns property in inventions any more than in real property. Here also,” he adds, “the right of one ought to prevail over the interest of the greater number.”
It is no doubt intentionally that the word interest in this phrase is put in opposition to the word “right.” But would it not be more correct to say, the right of the community ought to prevail over the interest of the individual.
Individual right in property is certainly worthy of respect, and cannot be called in question; but to our thinking, the right of the community precedes and is superior to it. A part cannot be greater than the whole; no one can place his right above that of mankind, and the individual cannot oppose his will, good or bad, on the whole community.
We belong to no learned corporation—a simple volunteer in the army of economist disputants—and have no other banner than that of the truth; but we cannot refrain from saying one word in defence of those whom the learned Belgian speaks of among many others in these terms: “The judgment of the Academy of Sciences on the steamboat invented by Fulton may help to form an estimate of the contradiction which experience sometimes inflicts on the best-intentioned verdict of a committee of savants.”
We assert as a fact that if the steamboat presented to the Academy of Sciences by Fulton were now submitted to the judgment of a committee of machine builders, they would declare unanimously that the boat could not navigate. We wish in no way to seek to depreciate the acknowledgments which mankind owes to Fulton; but his invention, as all are at starting, was only a sketch, which required half a century of labour to perfect and to make as practical as it now is.
Here there is room for an observation which must be noted.
The advocates for the principle of property in inventions fall into ecstacies before a transatlantic steamer, and exclaim, “Behold, what a crying injustice! what deplorable ingratitude! Society has denied the rights of the inventor to this wonder of the sea! He died in poverty, or nearly so.”
Others go further back, and attribute to Solomon de Caux, or to Papin, all the honour; they forget that between Papin, or Solomon de Caux and Fulton, a crowd of men of genius brought their contributions of knowledge, experiment, and work of every kind; and that between Fulton and the makers of our day there are so many inventors, so many explorers, fortunate or unfortunate, ridiculous or serious, whose attempts or applications have helped to perfect the steam-engine, that it may truly be said that every one has had a hand in it.
It is the same with the railway, the electric telegraph, and the different machines for spinning, carding, weaving, &c.