THEIR ROUND OF LIFE AND LABOUR. 81 
all that might be necessary. With such a sum and its accu- 
mulations to fall back upon, fishermen would be indepen- 
dent of the bestowal of public charity. We know that 
associations of different kinds have of late years been or- 
ganized for the insurance of fishing gear, chiefly the boats, 
and smack owners have joined their forces in this direction. 
We should be glad to see the fishermen acting in combina- 
tion to obtain both a provision for accidents of all kinds, 
but for the time of old age as well. 
We offered recently in the pages of a popular peri- 
odical, the following suggestion for the benefit of the 
Scottish fishermen. “There is another way of solving 
the question of how the fisher-folk might provide for a 
rainy-day. Taking the herring-fishery as the typical fishery 
of Scotland, an industry at which, during some portion of 
the year, every unit of the fishery population assists, we 
may state that the value to the fishermen of the herrings 
which they capture can scarcely be less than two millions 
of pounds sterling per annum. A million barrels at least 
are cured, and large quantities of herring are caught in ad- 
dition, and sold fresh. Accepting the value of the fish to 
their captors as being two millions sterling—a barrel, it may 
be stated, contains about seven hundred and fifty fish, and 
these, at the price of a half-penny each, come to a sum of 
thirty-one shillings and threepence ; so that the figure we 
have given is by no means an exaggeration—is it too much 
to ask of the fishermen that they should devote a sixpence 
of the price obtained for each barrel to insurance of boats 
and lives? How much do a million sixpences come to? 
A million sixpences amount to the very handsome total of 
twenty-five thousand pounds; a far larger sum than would, 
one year with another, be required; so that to all appear- 
ance, an assessment of threepence, or at the most fourpence, 
G 
