of brutal candor and selfishness shine out as brilliant virtues.
[Footnote: No observation could be truer. As a class, the
manufacturers were flourishing on stolen inventions. There might be
exceptions, but they were very rare. Year after year, decade after
decade, the reports of the various Commissioners of Patents pointed
out the indiscriminate theft of inventions by the capitalists. In
previous chapters we have referred to the plundering of Whitney and
Goodyear. But they were only two of a vast number of inventors
similarly defrauded.

In speaking of the helplessness of inventors, J. Holt, Commissioner
of Patents, wrote in his Annual Report for 1857: "The insolence and
unscrupulousness of capital, subsidizing and leading on its minions
in the work of pirating some valuable invention held by powerless
hands, can scarcely by conceived by those not familiar with the
records of such cases as I have referred to. Inventors, however
gifted in other respects, are known to be confiding and thriftless;
and being generally without wealth, and always without knowledge of
the chicaneries of law, they too often prove but children in those
rude conflicts which they are called on to endure with the stalwart
fraud and cunning of the world." (U. S. Senate Documents, First
Session, Thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-58, viii: 9-10). In his Annual
Report for 1858, Commissioner Holt described how inventors were at
the mercy of professional perjurers whom the capitalists hired to
give evidence.

The bribing of Patent office officials was a common occurrence. "The
attention of Congress," reported Commissioner of Patents Charles
Mason in 1854, "is invited to the importance of providing some
adequate means of preventing attempts to obtain patents by improper