FOURTH INTERNATIONAL FISHERY CONGRESS. 
WASHINGTON, U. S. A., 1908. 
&* 
SESSIONAL BUSINESS. 
* 
PRELIMINARY MEETING, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22. 
DEPARTMENT OF STATE. 
The foreign delegates and others convened in the Diplomatic Room of the 
Department of State at 9.30 a. m. and were received by the Assistant Secretary 
of State, Hon. Alvey A. Adee. 
Secretary ADEE. Gentlemen, I have much pleasure in greeting you. It 
would have been Secretary Root’s privilege to meet you, but he is detained at 
his summer home, in northern New York, and has asked me to welcome you 
in his name. Falling on me at the last moment, this agreeable duty finds me 
unprepared to make a formal address. With your kindly indulgence, I venture 
to offer a few desultory remarks. 
Your mission is beneficent. It deals with a phase of the world-old yearning 
for the conquest of the sea. From Salamis to Trafalgar, from Trafalgar to our 
own day, the peoples have been rivals for its mastery. Not alone have their 
mighty fleets striven for supremacy, but their traders have sought to acquire its 
commercial control for their own advantage. But this keen contest has been 
for domination upon the face of the waters. Beneath the surface lie other and 
nobler prizes to be won. We seek those prizes not as embittered antagonists, 
but as associates in the interest of the great solidarity of mankind. 
Above the problem of naval and commercial supremacy is the greater prob- 
lem of the sustenance and maintenance of the peoples. Without the farmer, 
the stock raiser, the miner, and the fisherman, there could be no wide-reaching 
empires, no armies, no navies, no marvelous progress in civilization, no develop- 
ment of culture or science, for the producers supply the means by which all these 
things are done. It is through the producers, the men who wring from the 
earth and the seas the means of supporting existence itself, that national life 
is begotten and developed. It is by the abundance of the producers’ returns 
that the world’s prosperity may be measured. 
It was said long ago, by a philosopher of the mythical Commonwealth of 
Brobdingnag, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass 
B. B. F. 1908—2 7 
