THE POLLUTION OF THE SEA 25 



to tidal waters, and therefore whatever virtue may reside in 

 them cannot be exercised so as to prevent or minimise the 

 pollution of the sea. It is true that the Local Government 

 Board may declare a tidal river to be a river or watercourse 

 within the meaning of the Rivers Pollution Prevention Acts, but 

 this power has been exercised very reluctantly and sparingly 

 for some reason or other. These statutes do not, therefore, 

 help us. The Sea Fisheries Regulation Acts seem, at first sight, 

 to promise better results, for they prohibit the discharge into 

 tidal waters of any substances which are detrimental to fish- 

 life. But we find that this prohibition is so qualified as to be 

 useless. If the discharge is that of a manufacturing effluent 

 it can usually be dealt with under these Acts, but such cases 

 are far less numerous than those of the discharge of sewage 

 into estuarine or open sea waters. If a local authority is 

 empowered by Parliament to discharge sewage into sea or tidal 

 waters the prohibitions of the Sea Fisheries Regulation Acts 

 do not apply, and it has been held that the Public Health Acts 

 do confer this power to pollute the sea and the fisheries upon 

 the local sanitary authorities. Also it must be proved that 

 the discharge of sewage into sea water is detrimental to fish-life, 

 and this proof is unobtainable, as a rule. Shellfish, such as 

 oysters and mussels, live well and even " fatten " in sea water 

 containing a large admixture of crude domestic sewage, and so 

 long as the pollution is not injurious to the health of the mussels 

 or oysters it cannot be prohibited by the fishery authorities, 

 even if the other difficulty — that of the supposed statutory 

 privilege of the health authorities to pollute the fisheries — could 

 be overcome. Further, it is the case that the only authority 

 (until very recent times) which could prohibit the fishery for 

 oysters or mussels from a polluted shore was the Fisheries 

 Committees, but these bodies could only do so in the interests 

 of the fisheries, and not in that of the public health. On the 

 other hand the health authorities which could intervene for the 

 protection of the public health had no power to prohibit fishery 

 in a polluted area. This was a real impasse, not a made-up, 

 comic-opera sort of situation, and the actual attempt of a 

 Fisheries Committee to close a highly polluted mussel bed was 

 prevented (as ultra vires) by the Board of Trade. In the present 

 year (1915) this power to close polluted shell-fisheries has been 

 given to the local health authorities but it has been given in 



