their first royalties, in lieu of paying money for the purchase of all their patents. After this deduction was made, they were to pay me the same royalties as I charged to other licensees on all the steel they produced.

Thus the two great objects I had in view were accomplished. The signing of my deed of license took the sting out of my opponents, for it contained what lawyers call an "estoppel clause," in which they, under their hands and seals, acknowledged the perfect validity of all my patents: "That they were new and useful," and "were sufficiently described in my specifications," and that "they were all duly specified within the time prescribed by law." This clause deprived them of the possibility of attacking my patents, or refusing to pay the royalties agreed upon in their deed of license.

It was also important that I should get the assignments of all their patents. Not that these patents were in themselves worth the paper they were written on, but so long as they existed and were the property of some other persons, they were fighting material, and could be utilised to keep me in the Law Courts possibly for a couple of years. This might have cost me an amount of money immensely greater than the loss I should sustain by the Ebbw Vale Company's not paying me a royalty on their first year's production of steel; which was, in fact, only the loss of what never would have been mine if I had let them go on their own way unopposed. Under these conditions I withdrew all opposition to the formation of the new steel company, and after a not very long interval I began to receive from the Ebbw Vale Company large sums quarterly in the form of royalty. I cannot, at this distant period, find all the returns of the sums they paid me, but I am under the impression that I received from them altogether in royalties between £50,000 and £60,000; added to this they had given up all the patents which had been held for years suspended over me.

Thus happily was removed the last barrier to the quiet commercial progress of my invention throughout Europe and America -- an invention which from its infancy has steadily grown in extent and importance, until the production of Bessemer steel has reached an annual amount of not less than 10,500,000 tons, equal to an average production of 33,500 tons in every working day of the year, and having a commercial daily value of a quarter of a million sterling.