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By Root 1964 0

had observed those 1829 hearings with "astonishment," and was flabbergasted that nobody had advanced his ownview, whichwas that patents should be akin to copyrights, obtainable easily and "without any expense whatsoever" "Why should not an invention be property at common law," he asked, "like a book, which is protected by statute only to enable the author to recover more summarily?"9 His conviction was no less consequential for being ill founded (copyright did not in fact have this legal status at this time). And Brewster went public with his opinion in his long review of Babbage in the uarterly f Review - a review widely seen as a distinct manifesto for the so-called decinist camp. Brewster even went beyond Babbage in several key respects, the most important of them being patenting. He would later admit that the review had in fact been commissioned by the editor precisely to serve as an attack on the "iniquity" of the patent laws -and that it had been so influential as to become "an integrant part of their history" 10

Brewster fully concurred with Babbage in diagnosing British science to be in "awretched state of depression." Other nations had used the years of peace since Waterloo to renew their long-standing devotion to the arts and sciences, he noted, often through state sponsorship and the awarding of honors. The institutions of science in France, Prussia, and Russia boasted munificent state and aristocratic support, and Brewster delved back into the past to recount the ways in which natural philosophers and mathematicians from Galileo to Volta had benefited from such patronage. Britain, by contrast, had done nothing. Since 1815 it had chosen rather to rest on its reactionary military laurels. The universities had no positions for researchers, the Royal Society and its counterparts in Dublin and Edinburgh had no funds for stipends (they even charged their members fees), and not a single philosopher currently enjoyed a state living. Britain had even recently abolished its one state scientific body of any consequence, namely, the Board of Longitude-a highly symbolic act that had helped provoke Babbage's alarum.

Brewster warned that this indifference had a direct impact on research. Prominent scientific figures were compelled to eke out a living by lowlevel teaching, or else, as at the University of Edinburgh, by lecturing to paying audiences-an activity that reduced them to showmen in competition with itinerant lecturers. "In this age of extended and diluted knowledge," he remarked bitterly, "popular science has become the staple of an extensive trade, in which charlatans are the principal dealers." The horror of it was revealed by the fact that professors were even "devoting themselves to professional authorship." A lecturer was forced to be a "commercial speculator," a role that left no place for original researches. None of the great inventions and discoveries of the past century had originated at the universities, Brewster claimed, and, he added mischievously, "there is not one man in all the eight universities of Great Britain who is at present known to be engaged in any train of original research." Such a charge exceeded even Babbage's high standards of tactlessness, and Brewster soon had to scramble for a face-saving account of what he had meant in the face of the formidable William Whewell.11

Brewster now launched in earnest into his assault on the inadequacy of the patents regime. With the sciences left to languish, British economic power rested on the mechanical, chemical, and agricultural arts. But these he thought had been not just neglected but actively oppressed. Brewster had told Brougham two years before that the patents regime was "horrid."" Now he declared the whole thing not merely a lottery but a fraudulent one, "which gives its blanks to genius and its prizes to knaves." It robbed inventors to fill the pockets of state officials. The system enshrined "vicious and fraudulent legislation." It furnished an inventor with a "factitious privilege" of no genuine value, and charged an exorbitant "tax upon