The Editor's Bag other forms of monopolies is so funda mental that in the present state of our commercial morality the fullest possible enjoyment of the fruits of a patent is not to be condemned as savoring of moral turpitude. When there is a tendency to make patentees the victims of that same popular covetousness which would shear all great industrial combinations of their strength, one's sympathy naturally goes out to the patentee, and one is tempted to plead that he be permitted a free hand in fixing the terms of sale of his patented product. We feel that the decision in the Dick case was just, there being no evidence that the conditions attached to the sales of the mimeograph were oppres sive or contrary to sound public policy. At the same time, it may be well to contradict the notion that under any view of the common law a patentee can possess an absolute monopoly of sale. If a condition were embodied in the agreement of sale, for example, to do some unlawful act, to perpetrate a crime, for example, or merely to com mit a tort as a condition precedent to obtaining possession of the article sold, it would be nudum pactum. The right of the patentee is not paramount to sovereignty itself, and is not absolute. While a patentee enjoys the right to fix whatever price for his article he chooses, there should be nothing in the law giving him the right to exact pay ment not only in money, but in for feiture of personal liberty, or in acts done solely for the patentee's benefit tending to destroy the business of others by other means than the quality or cheapness of his product. For these reasons, if we presuppose the existence of a definite body of law defining offenses against fair competi tion, it would be right to prohibit pat
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entees from coercing their customers to commit these acts in illegal restraint of trade, and Congress may well consider the advantage of carefully drawn legis lation regulating a patentee's monopoly of sale. But it would be most inequit able to sweep away, at one stroke, all the protection which the patent laws now afford a patentee in the enjoyment of the right to make profitable use of his patent. An opposite decision in the Dick case would have been unfortunate, and its mischief could not have been easily repaired, but the decision actually rendered leaves no very heavy burden on the shoulders of Congress. MR. JUSTICE PITNEY PRESIDENT TAFT has made Chancellor Mahlon Pitney of New Jersey an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, succeeding the late Justice Harlan. Chancellor Pitney meets many of the President's requirements for a Supreme Court justice. He is just a little more than fifty-four years old, six years under Mr. Taft's "age limit," and has been a practising lawyer and judge since 1882. The new Justice is a Princeton man. His father, Henry C. Pitney, was a Vice-Chancellor of New Jersey. His mother was Sarah Louis Halsted. Mah lon Pitney was born at Morristown, Feb. 5, 1858. He was graduated from Princeton in the class of 1879, received the Master's degree three years later, and when he became Chancellor was honored with the degree of Doctor of Laws from his Alma Mater. He was admitted to the bar in 1882 and began practice in Morristown. Although he had an active practice, he took an interest in politics, and in 1894 was elected to Congress as a Re publican in a Democratic district, and
