I3 
difficult if not impossible to overcome. In the first place, , 
under the shade of those abuses established, recognised, or 
tolerated by former laws, there will have grown up a crowd 
of well-to-do interests which it is not possible to disregard, 
and hence the necessity for a fundamental principle of 
the law dealing with such cases, if the State does not take 
measures for satisfying them pecuniarily, of which case we 
have in Spain so eloquent an example. 
It results from what has been said that the Government 
should prevent the use of trawling gear, called dou, since 
ample information and an attentive study show the 
evident necessity for putting an end to this system of 
fishing. It has been proposed to issue regulations imposing 
on its exercise specified limits of time and distance, and 
forbidding the employment of new gear, but this suggestion 
is of no avail in practice, as the possessors of such gear 
naturally desire to keep them as long as possible and never 
proceed to break them up. Thus the essential point of the 
law is evaded, which would not be the case if the govern- 
ment bought up the apparatus and awarded compensation, 
at the same time absolutely forbidding the employment of 
such apparatus in fisheries. 
In imposing a system of absolute restrictions, it must not 
be forgotten that these will be sure to provoke an un- 
popularity which no government can afford to disregard. 
If, on the other hand, we pass to the opposite point, viz... 
altogether free working, it is a Utopian idea that by this 
means equilibrium will be maintained between production 
and extraction without any sovernment intervention, as 
was recently done in the United States in the way Professor 
Brown Goode so clearly explained to us. 
We do not know, however, if this modern procedure will 
_ give in the course of time the expected favourable results, 
