Our formidable warships are always ready to race to the furthest end of the world to protect our merchants and their wares. Even our missionaries have the "moral" support of our "strong arm," in forcing on the so-called heathens the barter of "cozy corners in Heaven" for "cash down," but it is a notorious fact that certain so-called civilized countries are making it their habit and custom quite openly to appropriate every invention that is worth appropriating, providing the inventor is a foreigner, and the unfortunate inventor has not even got a cause of action at law, nor would the inventor's complaint at the State Department be productive of anything more substantial than polite regrets. These modern Barbary Pirates need not fear another Commodore Perry, so long as they devote their depredations solely to the comparatively more valuable production of the brains instead of the hands.