I have long had under contemplation, and been collecting materials for the plan of an university in Virginia which should comprehend all the sciences useful to us, and none others. The general idea is suggested in the Notes on Virginia, Qu. 14. This would probably absorb the functions of William and Mary College, and transfer them to a healthier and more central position: perhaps to the neighborhood of this place. The long and lingering decline of William and Mary, the death of its last president, its location and climate, force on us the wish for a new institution more convenient to our country generally, and better adapted to the present state of science. I have been told there will be an effort in the present session of our legislature, to effect such an establishment. I confess, however, that I have not great confidence that this will be done. Should it happen, it would offer places worthy of you, and of which you are worthy. It might produce, too, a bidder for the apparatus and library of Dr. Priestley, to which they might add mine on their own terms. This consists of about seven or eight thousand volumes, the best chosen collection of its size probably in America, and containing a great mass of what is most rare and valuable, and especially of what relates to America.
You have given us, in your Emporium, Bollman's medley on Political Economy. It is the work of one who sees a little of everything, and the whole of nothing; and were it not for your own notes on it, a sentence of which throws more just light on the subject than all his pages, we should regret the place it occupies of more useful matter. The bringing our countrymen to a sound comparative estimate of the vast value of internal commerce, and the disproportionate importance of what is foreign, is the most salutary effort which can be made for the prosperity of these States, which are entirely misled from their true interests by the infection of English prejudices, and illicit attachments to English interests and connections. I look to you for this effort. It would furnish a valuable chapter for every Emporium; but I would rather see it also in the newspapers, which alone find access to every one.
Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper, as we were formerly by the old Continental paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burthen all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs. Prudent men must be on their guard in this game of Robin's alive, and take care that the spark does not extinguish in their hands. I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin. But our whole country is so fascinated by this Jack-lantern wealth, that they will not stop short of its total and fatal explosion.[10]
Have you seen the memorial to Congress on the subject of Oliver Evans' patent rights? The memorialists have published in it a letter of mine containing some views on this difficult subject. But I have opened it no further than to raise the questions belonging to it. I wish we could have the benefit of your lights on these questions. The abuse of the frivolous patents is likely to cause more inconvenience than is countervailed by those really useful. We know not to what uses we may apply implements which have been in our hands before the birth of our government, and even the discovery of America. The memorial is a thin pamphlet, printed by Robinson of Baltimore, a copy of which has been laid on the desk of every member of Congress.
You ask if it is a secret who wrote the commentary on Montesquieu? It must be a secret during the author's life. I may only say at present that it was written by a Frenchman, that the original MS. in French is now in my possession, that it was translated and edited by General Duane, and that I should rejoice to see it printed in its original tongue, if any one would undertake it. No book can suffer more by translation, because of the severe correctness of the original in the choice of its terms. I have taken measures for securing to the author his justly-earned fame, whenever his death or other circumstances may render it safe for him. Like you, I do not agree with him in everything, and have had some correspondence with him on particular points. But on the whole, it is a most valuable work, one which I think will form an epoch in the science of government, and which I wish to see in the hands of every American student, as the elementary and fundamental institute of that important branch of human science.[11]
I have never seen the answer of Governor Strong to the judges of Massachusetts, to which you allude, nor the Massachusetts reports in which it is contained. But I am sure you join me in lamenting the general defection of lawyers and judges, from the free principles of government. I am sure they do not derive this degenerate spirit from the father of our science, Lord Coke. But it may be the reason why they cease to read him, and the source of what are now called "Blackstone lawyers."
Go on in all your good works, without regard to the eye "of suspicion and distrust with which you may be viewed by some," and without being weary in well doing, and be assured that you are justly estimated by the impartial mass of our fellow citizens, and by none more than myself.
TO OLIVER EVANS, ESQ.
Monticello, January 16, 1814.
Sir,—In August last I received a letter from Mr. Isaac McPherson of Baltimore, on the controversies subsisting between yourself and some persons in that quarter interested in mills. These related to your patent rights for the elevators, conveyors, and hopper-boys; and he requested any information I could give him on that subject. Having been formerly a member of the patent board, as long as it existed, and bestowed in the execution of that trust much consideration on the questions belonging to it, I thought it an act of justice, and indeed of duty, to communicate such facts and principles as had occurred to me on the subject. I therefore wrote the letter of August 13, which is the occasion of your favor to me of the 7th instant, just now received, but without the report of the case tried in the circuit court of Maryland, or your memorial to Congress, mentioned in the letter as accompanying it. You request an answer to your letter, which my respect and esteem for you would of themselves have dictated; but I am not certain that I distinguish the particular points to which you wish a specific answer. You agree in the letter, that the chain of buckets and Archimedes screw are old inventions; that every one had, and still has, a right to use them and the hopper-boy, if that also existed previously, in the forms and constructions known before your patent; and that, therefore, you have neither a grant nor claim, to the exclusive right of using elevators, conveyors, hopper-boys, or drills, but only of the improved elevator, the improved hopper-boy, &c. In this, then, we are entirely agreed, and your right to your own improvements in the construction of these machines is explicitly recognized in my letter. I think, however, that your letter claims something more, although it is not so explicitly defined as to convey to my mind the precise idea which you perhaps meant to express. Your letter says that your patent is for your improvement in the manufacture of flour by the application of certain principles, and of such machinery as will carry those principles into operation, whether of the improved elevator, improved hopper-boy, or (without being confined to them) of any machinery known and free to the public. I can conceive how a machine may improve the manufacture of flour; but not how a principle abstracted from any machine can do it. It must then be the machine, and the principle of that machine, which is secured to you by your patent. Recurring now to the words of your definition, do they mean that, while all are free to use the old string of buckets, and Archimedes' screw for the purposes to which they had been formerly applied, you alone have the exclusive right to apply them to the manufacture of flour? that no one has a right to apply his old machines to all the purposes of which they are susceptible? that every one, for instance, who can apply the hoe, the spade, or the axe to any purpose to which they have not been before applied, may have a patent for the exclusive right to that application? and may exclude all others, under penalties, from so using their hoe, spade, or axe? If this be the meaning, my opinion that the legislature never meant by the patent law to sweep away so extensively the rights of their constituents, to environ everything they touch with snares, is expressed in the letter of August 13, from which I have nothing to retract, nor ought to add but the observation that if a new application of our old machines be a ground of monopoly, the patent law will take from us much more good than it will give. Perhaps it may mean another thing, that while every one has a right to the distinct and separate use of the buckets, the screw, the hopper-boy, in their old forms, the patent gives you the exclusive right to combine their uses on the same object. But if we have a right to use three things separately, I see nothing in reason, or in the patent law, which forbids our using them all together. A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane separately; may he not combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things we have.