64 COMMISSIONERS OF INLAND FISHERIES. 



completely fished out around the whole coast. Canners who once 

 put up three thousand cases cannot produce two hundred now.' 



" 'The St. John's (N. F.) 'Trade Review' says: ''There is no use 

 mincing matters. The present deplorable condition of our lobster 

 fishery is due entirely to the cowardice of the government, who are 

 afraid to carry out the law. They have a regulation calling for a 

 defined length of lobster for packing, but they know that this law is 

 broken every day in the year; but, fearing to lose the fisherman's 

 vote, they will not prosecute. Thus it goes on year after year, the 

 available lobsters becoming smaller and smaller, until at present it 

 sometimes takes the meat of thirty or forty fish to fill a one-pound 

 can.' ('Fishing Gazette,' Jan. '09, p. 103.)' " 



From time to time, for many years, the legislature of this State 

 has enacted statutes for the preservation of game and fish and by 

 Pub. Laws, cap. 920, passed Mar. 21, 1871, provided for the appoint- 

 ment of commissioners of inland fisheries whose duties, inter alia, 

 were "to introduce, protect and cultivate fishing in our inland 

 waters." The protection of lobsters was afterwards intrusted to 

 them and in their report, to the General Assembly for the year 1909, 

 it appears that during the preceding eleven years they have been 

 engaged in hatching, rearing and liberating lobsters for the benefit 

 of the people of the State and that more than a million lobsters have 

 been propagated and liberated by them in the past ten years, and 

 they claim that for several years their annual output of such lobsters 

 had been many times greater than that from any of the several 

 stations engaged in like work, both in this country and abroad. It 

 also appears from the same report that the expense to the State for 

 laboratory, services and expenses of deputies under the lobster law, 

 and for egg-lobsters purchased, for that year amounted to over ten 

 thousand dollars. The report of said commissioners for the year 

 1908, already alluded to, contains the following remarks relative to 

 the lobster fishery and also concerning an act which afterwards 

 became the statute now under consideration: "On account of the 

 present importance of the industry and the increased difficulties and 



