534 THE HISTORY OF DUTCH SEA FISHERIES. 



forty million ; but it was sixty-eight million in 1851, and 

 little more than one million in the next year. 



I have now briefly to narrate why and how the system of 

 sea-fishery regulation and protection was relinquished. 



The main cause of this most important reform was the 

 fact that rational notions on political economy began to 

 prevail in the Netherlands in the second quarter of the 

 present century, especially after the secession of the Belgian 

 provinces in 1830. It was between 1830 and 1850 that 

 Free Trade was decidedly adopted as the base of the king- 

 dom's commercial policy ; and to its adherents nothing 

 could be more objectionable than sea-fishery protection in 

 its actual form. The evils of monopoly, and the folly of 

 paying bounties out of the public funds to encourage an 

 industry while keeping it down by rules, began now to be 

 fully realised, and public opinion, led by able writers in 

 periodicals, gradually turned away from the system. It did 

 indeed continue after most other items of protection had 

 been abandoned ; and the main reason of this is, that the 

 public at large were still kept in a state of excitement by 

 wonderful accounts of the herring fishery's ancient great- 

 ness, and taught to believe that this greatness had been 

 attained by similar protective measures as were now in 

 force ; whereas I have shown that the principal, and most 

 stringent of those measures were invented long after the 

 fisheries' decay had begun. But this was not known at the 

 time now spoken of. Whenever the subject was broached, 

 writers and speakers in the fishery interest used to declaim 

 out of Semeyns' and Raleigh's tales of wonder, and to take 

 it for granted that those splendours, in which they still 

 believed implicitly, were owing to our ancestors having 

 done as we did now. The curious cry of " Try not to be 

 wiser than thy fathers" was never raised with a more bois- 



