184 PROTECTION- OF FISH. 



siderable portion of the diet of the poor, and an 

 acceptable change, if not permanently agreeable, to 

 the rich. Whatever serves for food to the people, 

 above all to the lower class, deserves the attention 

 of the statesman, and any practice that will tend to 

 diminish its price demands the assistance of the 

 philanthropist. Consider if the price of fish were 

 suddenly to double, how far the injury Avould ex- 

 tend, and how much suffering would follow. When 

 a gradual change takes place in the cost of any arti- 

 cle of food, man adapts himself to altered circum- 

 stances, and the loss, though equally great, is not so 

 perceptible as when the advance is sudden. 



That the supj^ly of this food can be exhausted, 

 and its quality easily reduced, is painfully apparent ; 

 streams in the neighborhood of Xew York that for- 

 merly were alive with trout are now totally desert- 

 ed. The Bronx, famous alike for its historical asso- 

 ciations and its once excellent fishing, does not now 

 seem to hold a solitary trout, or indeed fish of any 

 kind. The shad that a few years ago swarmed up 

 the Hudson River in numbers incomputable, have 

 become scarce and quadrupled in price during the 

 last decade. Salmon, most nutritious and noblest 

 of fish, which in ancient days paid their yearly visits 

 in vast numbers, if early historians are to be be- 

 lieved, to our principal rivers as far south as the 

 Delaware, are at present taken nowhere to the 

 southward of Maine, and in but limited quantities 

 even in that wild region. 



On every portion of our sea-coast, in spite of re- 



