Walton H. Hamilton

What Is a Patent

Patents only protect inventions that are novel and inventive at the time of applying for patent protection. However, these two requirements are not checked during the Swiss patent granting procedure. A patent is granted without a guarantee and can therefore be challenged by third parties. For this reason, it is essential that you clarify the novelty of your invention yourself via searches either before or after applying for a patent.

An Appraisal of Clay's Economics

It has been three years since Clays treatise upon general economics found its way into this country.1 The lapse of time enables a belated reviewer to substitute the fact of its reception for personal prediction and to qualify his judgment of its value in the light of the appraisal of the craft. Within this period the volume has won, if not great popu? larity, at least a substantial place for itself. More important still, those who have read it carefully and balanced its merits and defects against those of other treatments have come to value it highly. The place accorded to the volume has been of its own making. When it appeared its author was unknown in this country. He had no American reputation which could be drawn upon to endow the volume with worth. He occupied no distinguished chair in a venerable seat of learning whose value could be imputed to him and his book. The success of the vol? ume cannot be laid to the account of his publishers. They printed the first edition upon cheap paper and bound it between unattractive covers. They made so little effort to offer it as new food for the jaded appetite for general texts that their itinerants who found it in classroom use did not at once recognize it as an offering of the house they served. Its merits, bruited about by review and word of mouth, won the initial attention to it. It was only after its place was secure that an American edition2 appeared, beautifully printed and attractively bound, to entice the more elusive reader. It is well, therefore, to inquire into the char? acteristics which have enabled it unaided to win for itself a wide and

The Requisites of a National Food Policy

It is a commonplace that wars require the efforts of all the people of the nations involved. The effective prosecution of so unusual a business necessitates the use of old and young, of man and woman; of brawn and brain, of habit and nerve cell; its success is contingent upon an organization of the bewildering variety of tasks which make up the industrial life of a nation into an articulate system which has a single objective. The army which engages an enemy three thousand miles from home is the cutting edge of a vast and gigantic machine which ramifies unto the utmost confines of the land and apportions tasks to all sorts and conditions of men. To push to success the military program, or even to frustrate the designs of the enemy, the fighting force must be fed, clothed, sheltered, and provided with a minimum of amusement and recreation. It must also be supplied with a countless number of instruments and materials which the machine-technique has made essential to modern arms. This supply must be adequate and continuous; it must be adapted to the exigencies of military strategy; its elements must be in proper proportion to each other. Further, the number of men sent to the front must be as large as can be withdrawn from industry and maintained there and the materials supplied must attain the nations maximum. This industrial problem of the organization of supplies is an aspect of the larger problem of general strategy. The aggregate of supplies required, its resolution into its various component commodities, and the problem of securing these are all dependent upon the larger military purpose. Yet at first blush the problem seems simple. Ones experience in business, large or small, tells him that money is the indispensable means to the goods he craves. If he possess it, he can have even unto abundance; if he has it not, he must go empty and void. By analogy he concludes that money will of itself enable the government to supply its many and varied

Methods in Social Science: Three Reviews of the Rice Book

T HE appearance of a formidable volume upon method in social science was almost inevitable. In purpose and in plan it is quite in accord with current sense and reason. In society there are many actors and few students; the phenomena are numerous, and the resources of the inquirer meager; the course of events will not await the meticulous procedure of the careful scholar. The more plodding of us rebel at the slow, uncertain, and costly processes by which we come upon mites of near-truth; we yearn for dodges and devices by which we can encompass more facts, more speedily distil their meaning, and set down bigger and better verities. The more energetic among our associates see that scholarship is falling behind other trades, look hopefully to the ways of business, and attempt to contrive the machine process and large-scale organization into a technique of inquiry which is up to date. The out-and-out believers, who are lost without a creed, put their faith in a technology of intellectual production, all complete with an assortment of formulas by which great truths can be taken unawares. We differ in our needs, in our doubts, in our expectations; but we agree that, if the greater knowledge is to be had, our ways and means of finding out must be improved. The current volume represents an attempt to use method to discover method, to employ organized research to find out the ways of research. The venture rests upon the assumptions that the social disciplines are sciences, and that their procedure can be identified, abstracted from the inquiries in which they have been employed, set down as clear-cut formulas, and put to alien uses. An elaborate organization, consisting of a committee on scientific method, a managing editor, and a group of writers, is employed to winnow out and reduce to terms the methods used in contributions to knowledge. The idea of a case book has been borrowed and adapted to hold in unity the several discussions. And the whole imposing apparatus is directed toward the reduction to system of the most evasive of all social phenomena-the ways of the human mind in finding out.