We believe, with Bastiat, that the greatest service that could be conferred on mankind would be to remove the obstacles which stand between his efforts and the supply of his wants.
How does M. le Hardy de Beaulieu not see that no one has the right to make burdensome that which is naturally gratuitous, and that it is just to exact that no one should appropriate any part of what constitutes common property?
That learned Professor of the Brussels Museum tells us the inventor has a right to say to the manufacturer, “Find out my process for yourself if you can, search for it as I have done; but if you wish to spare yourself this labour, and avoid the risk of spending it in vain, consent to yield me a part of the expenses which I save you in simplifying your appliances.” And he asks us if we find this demand unjust or unreasonable.
Not only do we find this demand just and reasonable, but we maintain that it is the only one we can recognise. But M. le Hardy de Beaulieu forgets that, according to the Patent-Laws, things are not thus arranged. The inventor, with the law in his hand, and the law courts to support him, says to the manufacturer, “It is forbidden to you to search and to find; or if you search and find, you are forbidden to use the power or the agent when you have found it: the process which I have invented is my property, and no one has the right to use it, even if his researches, his labour, enable him to discover it; even if he had commenced the search before me, all his labour is lost. I alone am proprietor of this agent, power, or process.” If this system be right, he who first rendered productive the most indispensable natural agent could have confiscated the whole world to his profit.
III.
M. le Hardy de Beaulieu acknowledges that the savage who first thought of substituting a hut, as a habitation, for the cave, has not the right to forbid the construction of others like it.
This concession is as important as the preceding, and we shall probably end in agreeing. We must now inquire where may be found the exact limit between inventions of which imitation is allowed, and those in which it is forbidden.
The man who first made a canoe from the trunk of a tree, either naturally hollow or artificially by fire, or otherwise,—may he forbid his neighbours to make one like it?
If he may, where, then, is the difference between the hut and the boat? If not, what is the reason for this prevention?
From the boat we might gradually go on, up to the latest Patent, by invisible transitions; and we have still to find the exact point at which M. le Hardy de Beaulieu might say, There is the limit!