i6 



their natural enemies than the wholesale destruction of 

 herrings by the herring fleets has been shown to bear to 

 the havoc which other enemies besides man work among 

 them, and that is that it is infinitesimal. 



It is very doubtful whether the destruction of small fish 

 by trawlers is at all comparable to the destruction of small 

 fish by shrimpers, and, above all, by the whitebait fisher- 

 men. Now it is very certain that a shrimp dredge catches 

 more shrimps than small fish. If it did not, I fancy we 

 should hear a very loud outcry over the decay of the shrimp 

 fishery. If the shrimp trawlers therefore, catching enor- 

 mous quantities of one, or at the most, two kinds of crusta- 

 cean, do not exhaust the supply of those two animals, can 

 it be seriously argued that they will do much towards ex- 

 terminating, not one, nor two, but a dozen different kinds 

 of sea-fish, of which they capture a far smaller quantity, 

 which are all of them far more prolific than the shrimp, 

 and all of which make the shrimp their prey, while the 

 shrimp can do little or nothing in retaliation ? If, again, 

 the trawlers are to be disestablished because they are anni- 

 hilating our fisheries, surely the whitebait fishermen must 

 be included under the same ban. Numbers of men fishing 

 month after month, every year, not incidentally, but of 

 malice aforethought, for the young of herrings, sprats, and 

 other fish, in a single estuary, must surely do a. great deal 

 more damage than even a much larger number of men 

 fishing in the deep sea and catching young fish only as an 

 incident in their occupation. If the fish in the deep sea 

 are decreasing because of the ravages of the latter class, 

 surely the supply of whitebait in the estuary of the Thames 

 must be decreasing through the destruction occasioned by 

 the former. Yet as a matter of fact it is not diminishing ; 

 on the other hand, increasing quantities of whitebait are 



