DIFFERENCE IN THE TREATMENT METED OUT BY OUR GOVERNMENT TO HIM WHO RENDERS SERVICES TO SOCIETY, BY DIGGING IN THE DIRT, AND TO HIM WHO USES THE BRAIN.
[ CHAPTER 27
Society's Debt to the Inventor]
It is certainly good and just public policy that the Government should spend a good deal of money for the benefit of the farmers, but where is the justice and the good public policy in making money out of the inventors? (See statistics of the fiscal returns from the Patent Office.) Is the former more indispensable to society than the latter? Has not the ingenuity of the inventor enabled even the farmer, the special protegé of the Government, to get greater returns from his labor than ever in the history of the world? Has he not made his task lighter, and has he not enabled him to get more of the good things of the world for the earnings of his labor? And is it not in a great measure through the inventor's ingenuity and industry that this country has attained its unprecedented prosperity in Peace and mighty potency in War?
[ CHAPTER 28
Comparative Protection Given by the Government]
Our formidable warships are always ready to race to the furthest end of the world to protect our merchants and their wares. Even our missionaries have the "moral" support of our "strong arm," in forcing on the so-called heathens the barter of "cozy corners in Heaven" for "cash down," but it is a notorious fact that certain so-called civilized countries are making it their habit and custom quite openly to appropriate every invention that is worth appropriating, providing the inventor is a foreigner, and the unfortunate inventor has not even got a cause of action at law, nor would the inventor's complaint at the State Department be productive of anything more substantial than polite regrets. These modern Barbary Pirates need not fear another Commodore Perry, so long as they devote their depredations solely to the comparatively more valuable production of the brains instead of the hands.
HAS NOT THE INGENUITY OF THE INVENTOR ENABLED EVEN THE FARMER * * * TO GET GREATER RETURNS FOR HIS LABOR? * * * HAS HE NOT MADE HIS WORK LIGHTER AND HAS HE NOT ENABLED HIM TO GET MORE OF THE GOOD THINGS OF THIS WORLD?