14 American Fisheries Society 



on the statute books are not wise and would not accom- 

 plish anything if they were enforced, but the principal 

 reason is lack of enforcement, and it is here that igno- 

 rance and its offspring, prejudice, come into play. One 

 of the wisest of the writers on law has said that "He 

 who knoweth the law and knoweth not the reason of the 

 law, knoweth not the law; for the reason of the law is 

 the life of the law," and we must teach the mass of the 

 laiety the reason of the law if we wish to put life into 

 the law and get hearty co-operation in its enforcement. 



The greatest obstacle that we encounter in doing this 

 is the vanity of the American people. For more than a 

 century it has been a mark of so-called patriotism to 

 claim that the resources of our country are inexhaust- 

 ible, and anyone who called attention to the danger of 

 extravagant wastefulness, was considered an hysterical 

 alarmist or almost a traitor. In consequence of this 

 foolish talk, we are now seeing the end of our forests, 

 and geologists are estimating with alarming accuracy, 

 the length of time that will elapse before our stores of 

 iron and coal will be exhausted. National and state 

 governments are frantically taking steps to check the 

 ruthless destruction of these reserves of natural wealth 

 before it is too late, but their efforts will bear scanty 

 fruit unless the people be shown that the wonderful 

 wealth of our country is not limitless. When this is 

 grasped, and not until then, conservation will become an 

 accomplished fact. 



When America was first being settled by Europeans, 

 the abundance and variety of the fisheries of both the 

 salt and fresh waters made a deep impression on the 

 colonists. The Grand Banks fisheries played no small 

 part in causing the adjacent continental shores to be 

 colonized, and the fishes along the coasts and in the rivers 

 supplied the colonists with a large part of their food 

 during the earlier years of the settlements. The wide- 

 spread belief that this resource was inexhaustible led to 

 such reckless destruction that the fisheries began to de- 

 cline, and about the time of the Civil War the shad catch 



