(291.) A Species of combination occasionally takes place amongst manufacturers against persons having patents: and these combinations are always injurious to the public, as well as unjust to the inventors. Some years since, a gentleman invented a machine, by which modellings and carvings were cut in mahogany, and other fine woods. The machine resembled, in some measure, the drilling apparatus employed in ornamental lathes; it produced beautiful work, at a very moderate expense: but the cabinet-makers met together, and combined against it, and the patent has consequently never been worked. A similar fate awaited a machine for cutting veneers by means of a species of knife. In this instance, the wood could be cut thinner than by the circular saw, and no waste of it was incurred; but “the trade” set themselves against it, and after a heavy expense, it was given up.

Similar examples of combination seem not to be unfrequent, as appears by the Report of the Committee of the House of Commons on Patents for Inventions, June, 1829. See the evidence of Mr. Holdsworth.

(292.) There occurs another kind of combination against the public, with which it is difficult to deal. It usually ends in a monopoly, and the public are then left to the discretion of the monopolists not to charge them above the “growling point,”—that is, not to make them pay so much as to induce them actually to combine against the imposition.