NON-LEGISLATIVE REMEDIES. 215 



in the case of fowls. And why should fish be neglected 

 when so much care and cost are bestowed upon its con- 

 comitants ? Or, to take the question in a larger view, 

 is it not an ascertained fact that water, as well as land, 

 is capable of cultivation by man, so that, in some cases, 

 a piece of water may, by artificial means used in aid of 

 nature, be made as much more productive than it was 

 before the application of these means, as a field ploughed, 

 sown, and tended, is more productive than was the same 

 field in a state of nature and neglect ? 



Yet even those supplies of fish which nature offers 

 man merely for the taking, have been strangely little 

 thought of, and almost altogether uncared for, either as 

 to saving them from waste and destruction, or as to in- 

 creasing the supply proportionally to the increase of the 

 demand or need. There are few objects regarding which 

 both the Legislature and those engaged in the various 

 modes of production have of late years done or attempted 

 more than the increasing and cheapening of vegetable 

 and animal food ; with the result, not indeed of failure, 

 but neither certainly of quite keeping supply abreast of 

 the rapidly advancing demand, or producing all the 

 plenty and the cheapness that some hoped, and some 

 feared, and almost all expected. But whilst legislative 

 changes, and the progress of our own agriculture, have, 

 during the last quarter of a century, made immense 

 additions to the food of the population of the United 

 Kingdom, yet it is a fact that (with the recent and 

 temporary exception of wheat) food was scarcely ever so 

 steadily high in price, a fact which is of itself sufficient 

 to indicate the wisdom of leaving no source of supply 



