ECONOMICS OF THE FISHERIES 307 



methods, and at the wrong times and places; (3) legislation would halt the 

 declines and restore productivity. For a time (about 1872 to 1915) there 

 was also great confidence in the efficacy of fish culture. 



In Massachusetts 359 legislative acts were passed between 1623 and 

 1857 involving directly the protection of food fishes. '^ Running throughout 

 the Reports (from 1872) and Bulletins (from 1881) of the U. S. Fish Com- 

 mission is a continuous stream of alarms at the diminution and even "ap- 

 proaching exhaustion" that threatened the fisheries, and every improvement 

 and innovation of more efficient methods of capture (trawl lines in New 

 England, pound nets, use of purse seine for food fish, paranzella net in 

 California, beam- and later otter-trawl, etc.) were met with opposition, often 

 violent, much of which expressed itself in prohibitory laws. 



Implicit in the early literature is the belief that the amount of fish avail- 

 able is the sole determinant of the number and welfare of the fishermen, 

 and the belief that fishermen can and will continue to exploit to exhaustion 

 a fishery after it has reached a point of unprofitable yield. There is appar- 

 ently no thought of how prices would behave in the event of a scarcity of 

 fish in general or of particular species. While some skepticism was occasion- 

 ally expressed in legislative hearings, the consensus of general and official 

 opinion from 1872 to 1900 was that to perpetuate the fisheries there were 

 needed more restrictive legislation and extensive fish culture by hatching 

 eggs. A great program of hatching was carried out over the succeeding fifty 

 or sixty years (from the 1870's), but hatching seems now fairly well dis- 

 credited except for stocking lakes, streams, and ponds with game fishes. 

 While some of the more vulnerable anadromous species have indeed de- 

 clined in abundance notwithstanding both hatching and restrictive measures 

 (their habitats in the fresh water streams having been made largely unsuit- 

 able), the sea fisheries have continued to increase in yield. The catch even 

 of the Great Lakes fisheries was greater in 1940, 1945, and 1946 than it 

 was in 1879; New England fisheries have doubled, as have those of the old 

 Atlantic-Gulf fishery regions as a whole. 



It is not possible to determine how the tangle of restrictive legislation has 

 affected the yield of the fisheries, whether or not it has, in fact, preserved 

 the supply from "depletion," or whether it has helped to keep the fisheries 

 industry small by keeping its costs unnecessarily high. In any event the 

 demand for laws (originating to some extent among the fishermen them- 

 selves) continues. We have made no survey of legislation in the several 

 States. The commercial fisheries regulations of North Carolina (1948) 

 (apparently not including the basic law), contain, on casual count, 148 

 prohibitions. Instead of permitting the fisherman to sell his produce, what- 

 ever it is, for the best price obtainable, and the market to say, through price, 



6. Rept. U. S. Fish Comm., Part II, for 1872-73, p. 20. 



