DISCUSSION. 
Mr. CuarLes E. Fryer. Mr. President, ladies, and gentlemen, I am sure we are 
much obliged to Mr. Olsen for the paper he has read. It has occurred to me, in the 
course of the reading of it, that it might possibly be a little local in its character, and 
refer too much to matters in which we on the other side of the Atlantic are more inter- 
ested than you who are separated from us by so many miles of deep and, as I know 
to the full within the last few days, tempestuous water. 
The question of the international regulation of the fisheries on the high seas involves, 
I need hardly say, many very wide considerations. The first point to determine, no 
doubt, is whether it is the fish and the methods of catching them that you wish to take 
into account, or whether it is the more immediate interests of those who go in pursuit 
of the fish, namely, the fishermen. 
Where the fisheries are conducted over such enormous areas as the ocean, and not 
merely in the limited waters of rivers and estuaries, it almost follows that any steps 
that may be suggested for the protection of the fish must be both less necessary and 
more difficult to put into operation than any steps that may be taken for the protection 
of the fishermen; and I submit that so far as the high seas are concerned—and the 
title of the paper rather limits us to the high seas—the possibility of any international 
regulation is very much greater when we come to deal with such questions as the pro- 
tection of life, and the maintenance of law and order among the fishermen, than when 
we come to consider the possibility of protecting the fish themselves. 
The fisheries carried on in the high seas are to a large extent concerned with fish 
of whose habits we know very little. Notwithstanding all that has been done here in 
this great country—probably more than in the rest of the world put together—we still 
find that we are exceedingly ignorant of the minutie of the habits and of the habitat 
of the fish which constitute the great harvest of the sea. The more we know, the more 
I.think we find we need to know, and there is an enormous field of research to be ex- 
ploited before we can decide whether any protective measures should be adopted for 
the furtherance of the fisheries carried on in the high seas, more particularly with 
reference to those fish which are classed as pelagic rather than those which are more 
local in their habits. The first consideration, therefore, would be to decide upon a 
method of investigation; and, if I may take a leaf out of Mr. Olsen’s book and refer 
somewhat to what is taking place in western Europe, I may perhaps find a wider illus- 
tration of what is sought than can be found on this side of the Atlantic. You here in 
the United States are in the happy position of having very few neighbors—so far, at 
any rate, as the flag goes—to deal with. On the other side of the Atlantic we have a 
large number of nations—separate nations—each under its own separate government, 
interested in the fisheries in a relatively small portion of the sea, and it has become a 
much more important question with us to consider whether anything can be done for 
the protection and development of the fisheries—the fish themselves—than can be the 
case, or, at any rate, than has hitherto been found to be the case, in this country. 
For I am afraid to say how many centuries the British statute book alone has been filled 
with enactments, first for the promotion of the fisheries, and then for the protection of 
them; and the protection of them in the double sense of the word, with a big ‘‘ P’’— 
the protection of them against the foreigner; and with a small ‘‘p”—the protection 
of them against the depredations of what are held to be detrimental modes of fishing. 
For centuries we have been putting laws on the statute book, and we have been equally 
ready to wipe them out. We have found that we have made regulations in many cases— 
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