Hart.- — Pollution of Inland Streams. 167 



no man or set of men have any moral right to contaminate a na- 

 tural resource such as water belonging to all of the people any 

 more than they have a right to contaminate the air; that no man 

 or set of men, by the same token, have the right to use the water 

 unless they return it to its natural beds or channels in the same 

 purity as when taken by them. But we get nowhere, because we 

 assume to lead in these fights when the primary interests, such as 

 the state departments of health and the state departments of agri- 

 culture, should be in the vanguard and we poor little Isaak Waltons 

 in the rear guard and commissary department. You might just 

 as well put a six-year old boy in the ring with Dempsey and expect 

 him to win as to pit all the anglers in any state against all the 

 millions commandeered by these polluting industries. 



I am fundamentally against unnecessary pollution. I am fun- 

 damentally in favor of manufacturing industries and the use of 

 certain water courses by them, the damaging refuse to be cared 

 for where possible. Otherwise, to my mind, the feasible solution 

 is to have surveys made of the streams in each state, setting aside 

 certain of them for industrial enterprises and certain of them 

 for recreational purposes. Thus the angler will not be denied his 

 health-giving outings, and on the other hand your industrial enter- 

 prises will be relieved of that constant fear that they will be put 

 out of business by some legislative act. 



I do not know that anybody ever suggested this plan before. 

 I am satisfied that in some of our eastern states it would not work ; 

 for in some of them nearly every stream is polluted. But there 

 are states — Virginia, for instance — which have some open streams, 

 and it is just a question of time when something will be done 

 which will result in their being polluted. The scheme, therefore, 

 should receive consideration where pollution has not found its way 

 into every stream of a state. 



I feel, too, that the matter of publicity regarding pollution has 

 not been handled as it might have been. If you ask the average 

 man you meet in the country — or in the city, for that matter — 

 what his opinion is as to how long it will take water to clear itself, 

 he is apt to say it will do so within a distance of twenty miles 

 everytime. We know that that depends on the kind of pollution, 

 the amount of pollution, the rapidity with which the water is run- 

 ning, and so on. In fact, in the case of some kinds of pollution the 

 water never gets clear. Now, I have been in several aquaria. I 



