CONCLUSION. 249 



purposes of the law are widely different. Particular 

 questions of no small delicacy may, however, occur in 

 the administration of the law. The State has decided 

 that salmon rivers are worth preserving at the cost of 

 some compulsion and restriction ; and few persons who 

 are not extreme partisans of the individual citizen's 

 freedom to do as he pleases will object to this in principle. 

 But how far are we to go in each case ? Is the preserva- 

 tion always worth the cost ? Paper-mills and salmon, for 

 example, cannot thrive on the same water ; nor can it 

 be said in every case that the paper-mill may go where 

 there are no salmon, for not all river water is fit to make 

 paper with. Are we then bound to sacrifice a great 

 paper-mill for a small and poor salmon river, as might 

 conceivably be the result in some cases of a strict execu- 

 tion of the Salmon Fishery Acts ? These are the problems 

 which English statesmen and legislators have hitherto 

 refused, and most wisely refused, to deal with by general 

 formulas, and have left to be worked out by the good 

 sense and discretion of the persons concerned A law- 

 maker who thinks and speaks as if he were dealing with 

 a nation of fools will never make good laws ; a passion 

 for formulas is the mark not of an exact but of a petty 

 mind, and is capable of becoming the ruin of legislation 

 and politics. It is enough for us, as regards the matter 

 in hand, to know that our fishery laws, since their im- 

 provement was seriously taken up some twenty years 

 ago, have on the whole worked well and prevented much 

 mischief. From a lawyer's point of view (and, I should 

 think, from the point of view of any one who desires to 

 understand them) there is much to be mended in their 

 form. But with all their faults they are a fairly creditable 

 specimen of the manner in which that complex and over- 



