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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FROM THE STATUTE OF MONOPOLIES TO THE LONG PARLIAMENT, 1624-1640 The Act of Monopolies excepted several classes of grants from its condemnation. It sanctioned monopolies of new inventions for fourteen years, and of these a very considerable number were granted by Charles I, patents for new processes being particularly numerous.1 With these privileges the crown did not particularly concern itself after passing them. Their political importance lay in the fact that it was possible by virtue of this exception to continue the practice of reducing settled industries to monopolies under cover of technical improvements. Existing monopolies also, some of which were specifically named, were not to be prejudiced by the statute if they had been granted for new inventions for not more than twenty-one years. This reservation the Privy Council interpreted as a direct sanction for the particular monopolies named, and, on this pretext, quashed legal proceedings to test the legality of these grants,2 although the statute had explicitly directed that they should stand in the same position as before the statute, "and not otherwise." It is true that suits at law in such cases had been forbidden before the enactment, but there was certainly no authority for emphatically claiming the warrant of the statute. The act of 1624 was, however, weakest in its failure to grasp the significance of the trend of monopoly toward corporate form. From the accession of Elizabeth to the Civil War there was a process of gradual extension of monopoly privileges from a single individual to a group formed into a partnership or into a company. The usual form toward which the monopolies moved in their organization was that of a rudimentary joint-stock company. While the one-man monopoly was thus expand......