l pockets the enormous profits often resulting
from the invention. Besides, patents isolate the inventor. They compel
him to keep secret his researches which therefore end in failure;
whereas the simplest suggestion, coming from a brain less absorbed in
the fundamental idea, sometimes suffices to fertilize the invention and
make it practical. Like all State control, patents hamper the progress
of industry. Thought being incapable of being patented, patents are a
crying injustice in theory, and in practice they result in one of the
great obstacles to the rapid development of invention.

What is needed to promote the spirit of invention is, first of all, the
awakening of thought, the boldness of conception, which our entire
education causes to languish; it is the spreading of a scientific
education, which would increase the number of inquirers a hundredfold;
it is faith that humanity is going to take a step forward, because it is
enthusiasm, the hope of doing good, that has inspired all the great
inventors. The Social Revolution alone can give this impulse to thought,
this boldness, this knowledge, this conviction of working for all.

Then we shall have vast institutes supplied with motor-power and tools
of all sorts, immense industrial laboratories open to all inquirers,
where men will be able to work out their dreams, after having acquitted
themselves of their duty towards society; machinery palaces where they
will spend their five or six hours of leisure; where they will make
their experiments; where they will find other comrades, experts in other
branches of industry, likewise coming to study some difficult problem,
and therefore able to help and enlighten each other,--the encounter of
their ideas and experience causing the longed-for solution to be found.
And yet again, this is no dream. Solanoy Gorodok, in Petersburg, has
already partially realized it as regards technical matters. It is a
factory well furnished with tools and free to all; tools and motor-power
are supplied gratis, only metals and wood are charged for at cost price.
Unfortunately workmen only go there at night when worn out by ten hours'
labour in the workshop. Moreover, they carefully hide their inventions
from each other, as they are hampered by patents and Capitalism--that
bane of present society, that stumbling-block in the path of
intellectual and moral progress.

V

And what about art? From all sides we hear lamentations about the
decaden