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By Root 1924 0

the cause of abolishing patents in Westminster itself. This was the first general election in which all male householders could vote, a fact that MacFie regarded as confirming his mandate for radical change. He swiftly introduced a bill for abolition, supported by Stanley and his ally Roundell Palmer, now the attorney general. The immediate consequence was another round of impassioned debate. As well as the Inventors' Institute, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, another relatively new body, also now campaigned against abolition. Petitions arrived from many provincial associations too. With reform and abolition locked in contest, the battleground became very confused. Several groups well disposed to patents actually campaigned against reform bills, suspecting them to be stalking horses for the abolitionists. And yet another round of inquiries commenced.50 This one, however, in a bid to deal with the conflict once and for all, took a much wider remit than its predecessors. It was charged with considering not just how best to administer a patent system, but whether such a system should be maintained at all. And abolitionists were well represented on it, with William Robert Grove participating alongside Palmer, Armstrong, and MacFie. The Scientific Review feared that it was stacked against the inventorswho were, it pointed out, almost completely unrepresented.51The end of intellectual property, it warned, was in sight.

But the 1871 and 1872 inquiries did hear from two very prominent engineers. Both were immigrants. Henry Bessemer (a contributor to the Inventors' Institute) andWilliam Siemens were extraordinarily important figures in the steel and engineering industries, and both testified to the importance of the patents system in enticing people like them into Britain from overseas.52 At a time of renewed concern about the emigration of skilled workers, this testimony packed a very powerful rhetorical punch. On the other side, the arguments of MacFie and his allies proved vulnerable when empirical evidence of actual hardship caused by patents was demanded. Their campaign waxed indignant about patentees' obstructionism, but when confronted with Bessemer and Siemens, MacFie failed to point to concrete, empirical instances of either suppression or extortionate royalty demands. The antipatent case suddenly seemed to rest on a rather abstract extrapolation from political-economic theory. MacFie was ultimately maneuvered into admitting that he was seeking legislation to forestall problems that were more theoretical possibilities than actual, documented issues.

The same modernization and bureaucratization that had triggered the abolition campaign in the first place also counted against it now. The background labors of Woodcroft-who was an inventor as well as clerk to the Commissioners of Patents-were of critical importance. He had by now catalogued the previously unusable masses of patents, collected thousands of models, and instituted regular filing, indexing, and printing routines. For the first time, the patents regime became a usable archive. It did for the realm of invention and the public something like what Oldenburg had done for that of experiment and a much smaller community two centuries earlier. Along with the publishing of treatises defining the field and the chartering of patent agents, these measures made patenting a routine convention, imbued with moral as well as economic value for a large and growing community.53

Still, patenting might well have ended but for the general election of 1874. The election saw Disraeli's Conservatives replace the Liberals in government. MacFie lost his bid for reelection, and Palmer moved to the Lords. Overnight, the Commons therefore lost the two most active proponents of abolition. And the agenda of the new government was toward imperial consolidation and domestic social reform, not patent legislation. Eventually, in 1883, a new law did pass, but it was a law for the reformers, not the abolitionists. That law marked the passing of a generation when patenting might have ended