CONCURRENT REGULATIONS. 203 



which skins commanded in 1S91, when 68,000 were taken at sea. The 

 force had been steadily increasing for years, and there is no reason for 

 abelief that the progress would have ceased. Men will eagerly engage 

 in such pursuits long after the certainty of a profit disappears. It still 

 has great prizes, and it is these which tempt enterprise and risk. More 

 than this, the scheme scarcely interposes any additional difficulties. 

 It cuts off very little of the time during which pelagic sealing is now or 

 can be prosecuted with ad van tage. A very small additional force would 

 suffice to raise the capture to the amount obtainable by the present force 

 operating without restriction. 



But, finally, and decisively, the scheme itself furnishes a cause cer- 

 tain to bring to the work of destruction a force which would carry the 

 slaughter far beyond the limit even of 08,000 females per annum. It 

 cuts off from the market the supply from the breeding islands of 50,000 

 skins, leaving that enormous deficiency to be supplied by the pelagic 

 sealers! What greater boon could they ask? If these Commissioners 

 had deliberately set about to contrive a project for the stimulation of 

 pelagic sealing, and for the delight of those engaged in it, they could 

 have devised nothing so well calculated for that end as to take out of 

 the market 50,000 skins of the supply from the Pribilof Islands, when 

 the price stands at 125 shillings per skin, 1 and give the pelagic sealers 

 a chance to make up the deficiency between the 1st of May and the 1st 

 of September, with the privilege of entering Bering Sea on the 1st of 

 July, and of approaching the Pribilof Islands to a distance of 20 miles 

 therefrom. Indeed, with such temptations, they would greatly increase 

 the catch over present limits, even if they were excluded from Bering 

 Sea altogether. Their catch in the North Pacific during the present 

 year has, it is believed, amounted to nearly that. 



But we must not do the Commissioners the injustice of confining 

 criticism to a part of their scheme. It includes another feature of 

 restriction, which is indicated as furnishing "a just scale of equiva- 

 lency as befoveen shore and sea sealing," and " a complete check against 

 undue diminution of seals." This is that the United States may pro- 

 cure an addition of ten nautical miles to the radius of the zone of protec- 

 tion around the islands for each reduction of 10,000 below the maximum 

 of 50,000 to be allowed to be killed upon the islands, so that a pro- 

 tected zone of a radius of GO miles might be obtained by a volun- 



'Caso of the United States. Appendix, Vol. II, p. 561. 



