186 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES. 
should extend the fisheries, increase the amount of available fish food, and 
bring about a more harmonious relation between the United States and Canada. 
Furthermore, it should improve the lot of each individual fisherman. If the 
work is successful it should furnish models for the statutes of the different 
States and Provinces which have like problems and like interests. 
If this international project is carried out satisfactorily, the same remedy © 
should be applied to the difficulties arising from the migration of fishes in inter- 
state waters. The conditions are the same in Lake Michigan, controlled by 
the variant statutes of four States, as in Lake Erie with her five States and 
Provinces. 
The problem of the Columbia with its magnificent fisheries at the mercy 
of the inadequate, greedy, and variant statutes of Oregon, Washington, and 
Idaho, is far more difficult and more hopeless than that of the Fraser River 
and Puget Sound. 
Twenty-eight years ago in my report on the salmon fisheries of the Columbia 
I called attention to the fact that these fisheries would be depleted or destroyed 
unless the Government of the United States could intervene between Oregon 
and Washington. In each State fishermen try to take all they can get and 
the two legislatures can never agree on joint action of any kind adequate for 
the protection of the species. This has gone on from bad to worse until the 
Columbia fisheries are but a fraction of what they were in 1880. At the present 
time, under the referendum laws of Oregon, all fishing above tidewater is for- 
bidden in Oregon, and all gill-net fishing by night below tidewater limit is also 
prohibited. This practically closes all fishing on the Oregon side, while on 
the Washington side and in the spawning grounds of Idaho there is no limit of 
anykind. These statutes may be set aside by the courts—one or both of them— 
but meanwhile very few fishes reach the spawning grounds, and the fisheries 
four years hence will amount to nothing. All this comes from a struggle, car- 
ried into politics, between the associated (gill net) fishermen on the one hand 
and the owners of the fish wheels up the river on the other. 
The fisheries in the other boundary waters, Lake Michigan, the Mississippi, 
the Ohio, and the Potomac, are all in similar bad way. For this there is no 
remedy evident except for the United States to take control of all migratory 
animals of commercial value and to control and legislate for the interstate 
fisheries as it does for the interstate commerce and for the interstate weather. 
Matters of importance which no particular State can manage should be taken 
in hand by the United States. Problems which seesawing legislatures find 
insoluble because they can not agree on joint action are easy enough to a national 
commission. In this case the machinery for investigation and control (and 
all control must be based on scientific investigation) already exists in the United 
States Bureau of Fisheries. 
