In England, out of 56,000 patents more than 54,000 were voided and less than 2000 survived.
In America there is no voiding.
One of the consequences of this is that American firms have a choice of thirty-two patents where our firms have one.
According to the American patent office report for 1897, the American patents had, in seventeen years, found employment for 1,776,152 persons, besides raising wages in many cases as much as 173 per cent.
These few figures only give a view of part of the disadvantage under which British inventors and British manufacturers suffer.
I suggest, as the lawyers say, that British commercial conservatism and the British patent law have as much to do with the success of our clever and energetic American rivals as has what the Times calls the "invincible ignorance" of the British workman who declines to sacrifice his Union to atone by longer hours and lower wages for the apathy of his employers and the folly of his laws.
I submit, then, that the remedy is not the destruction of the Trade Unions, nor the lowering of wages, nor the lengthening of hours, but the nationalisation of the land, the abolition of royalties, the restoration of agriculture, and the municipalisation or the nationalisation of the collieries, the iron mines, the steel works, and the railways.
The trade of this country is handicapped; but it is not handicapped by the poor workers, but by the rich idlers, whose enormous rents and profits make it impossible for England to retain the foremost place in the markets of the world.
So I submit to the British workman that, since the Press, with some few exceptions, finds no remedy for loss of trade but in a reduction of his wages, he would do well to look upon the Press with suspicion, and, better still, to study these questions for himself.