all other Patent Office business;
seeing a part of what he pays yearly covered into the Treasury as
surplus, while his application is unreasonably delayed for the lack of
examiner force in the Patent Office.

Let the government first apply all the moneys received at the Patent
Office to its legitimate purpose, including the making of these
examinations, and, when this proves insufficient, you may depend
that every inventor will cheerfully consent to the increase of fees,
sufficient to insure the continuance of thorough examinations for
novelty, rather than attempt to do this work himself or take the
chances of his having reinvented some old device (which it is very
well known occurs over and over again every day), and being beaten
upon the very first contest in the courts, after, perhaps, investing
large amounts of money, time, and anxiety over something which he thus
discovers was invented, perhaps, before he was born.

For an inventor to obtain a patent worth having, and one that is
not more likely to be a source of expenditure than income to him, if
contested, it goes without saying that examination for novelty must
be made either by himself or some competent person or persons for him;
and it is strictly proper and just that the inventor should pay for
it; and it is too self-evident a proposition to admit of argument that
the organized and systematized methods of the Patent Office can do it
at a tithe of the expense which would be incurred in doing it in any
other way; in point of fact, it would be impossible to do it by any
other means so effectually or so well within any reasonable amount of
cost.

Your summing up of the case should, instead of the way you put it,
read: The Commissioner of Patents attempts to perform for two-thirds
the sum paid as fees by inventors what he is paid three-thirds to
accomplish, so that one-third of it may go to swell the surplus of
the United States Treasury, and finds it an impracticable task to
ascertain the novelty of an invention in a reasonable time for such a
sum. To perform it, however imperfectly, he feels authorized to delay
the granting; of patents, sometimes for several months, simply because
Congress will not allow him to apply the moneys paid by inventors to
their legitimate purpose.

I have had, for several years, always more or less applications on
file at the Patent Office for inventions in my particular line, and
now have several pending; and probably there are