CONCURRENT REGULATIONS. 209 



and incapable of restraining their desire for present enjoyment, in or- 

 der to secure their permanent welfare; and that the United States Gov- 

 ernment, which has a supervising control, either from the same or some 

 other unexplained reason, is equally incapable of protecting its own in- 

 terests and discharging its duty to mankind by preserving those boun- 

 ties of nature which have been intrusted to its keeping. In short, 

 their argument is that those means which nature has pointed out, and 

 which society from the earliest dawn of civilization has adopted and 

 followed, for the purpose of preserving the gifts of nature and making 

 them in the highest degree available for the uses of man, have, in this 

 instance, proved a failure; that the force of the universal motive of 

 self-interest has, in this instance, not been effective with the American 

 people, and consequently an occasion has arisen for the invention, by 

 the wisdom and ingenuity of these Commissioners, of some device bet- 

 ter adapted to the desired object! This is no perversion or exaggera- 

 tion of the argument of this report. It may be left to fall from its in- 

 trinsic weakness, not to say absurdity. 



(8) We are reluctant to make any reference to motives; but, where 

 opinions are, as in this case, made evidence, the question of good faith- 

 is necessarily relevant. Why is it that these Commissioners have 

 chosen to disregard the plain dictates of reason and natural laws which 

 they were bound to accept, and to recommend some cheap devices in 

 their place, when they so clearly perceived those dictates? We are not 

 permitted to think that this was in conscious violation of duty, if any 

 other explanation is possible. The only apology we can find comes 

 from the fact, clearly apparent upon nearly every page of their report, 

 that the predominating interest which they conceived themselves bound 

 to regard was not the preservation of the seals, but the protection of 

 the Canadian sealers. This explanation at once accounts for all their 

 extraordinary recommendations and all their varying inconsistencies. 

 Hence every degree of restraint upon pelagic sealing is reluctantly 

 conceded, and yielded only when it is compensated for, and more than 

 compensated for, by an added restriction of the supply furnished to 

 the market from the breeding islands. As the work of the pelagic 

 sealers is on the one hand restricted in time or place, and thus discour- 

 aged, it is on the other simulated by the certainty of a better market 

 and a richer reward. So persistently and exclusively have they kept 

 this j)olicy before them as their main object, that an ideal has been 

 14710—11 



