That last method of dealing with an invention, by the way, is a particularly vicious misuse of the patent laws, which ought not to allow property in an idea which is never intended to be realized.  One of the reforms waiting to be undertaken is a revision of our patent laws.

In any event, if the trust doesn’t want you to manufacture your invention, you will not be allowed to, unless you have money of your own and are willing to risk it fighting the monopolistic trust with its vast resources.  I am generalizing the statement, but I could particularize it.  I could tell you instances where exactly that thing happened.  By the combination of great industries, manufactured products are not only being standardized, but they are too often being kept at a single point of development and efficiency.  The increase of the power to produce in proportion to the cost of production is not studied in America as it used to be studied, because if you don’t have to improve your processes in order to excel a competitor, if you are human you aren’t going to improve your processes; and if you can prevent the competitor from coming into the field, then you can sit at your leisure, and, behind this wall of protection which prevents the brains of any foreigner competing with you, you can rest at your ease for a whole generation.

Can any one who reflects on merely this attitude of the trusts toward invention fail to understand how substantial, how actual, how great will be the effect of the release of the genius of our people to originate, improve, and perfect the instruments and circumstances of our lives?  Who can say what patents now lying, unrealized, in secret drawers and pigeonholes, will come to light, or what new inventions will astonish and bless us, when freedom is restored?

Are you not eager for the time when the genius and initiative of all the people shall be called into the service of business? when newcomers with new ideas, new entries with new enthusiasms, independent men, shall be welcomed? when your sons shall be able to look forward to becoming, not employees, but heads of some small, it may be, but hopeful, business, where their best energies shall be inspired by the knowledge that they are their own masters, with the paths of the world open before them?  Have you no desire to see the markets opened to all? to see credit available in due proportion to every man of character and serious purpose who can use it safely and to advantage? to see business disentangled from its unholy alliance with politics? to see raw material released from the control of monopolists, and transportation facilities equalized for all? and every avenue of commercial and industrial activity levelled for the feet of all who would tread it?  Surely, you must feel the inspiration of such a new dawn of liberty!

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There is the great policy of conservation, for example; and I do not conceive of conservation in any narrow sense.  There are forests to conserve, there are great water powers to conserve, there are mines whose wealth should be deemed exhaustible, not inexhaustible, and whose resources should be safeguarded and preserved for future generations.  But there is much more.  There are the lives and energies of the people to be physically safeguarded.