122 
comes down to the recent case of Manchester v. Massa- 
chusetts, 139 U. S., 258, and embraces elaborate and 
exhaustive opinions of such eminent jurists as Washing- 
ton, Story, Marshall, Curtis, Waite, Bradley and Shaw. 
The right of the State to control its own fisheries is 
sustained by the courts as a property right, and as an 
incident to the ownership of the soil beneath the waters, 
which has never been ceded or delegated to the United 
States, and it is held that the State may exclude citizens 
of other States from using said fisheries and may regu- 
late their use at its direction. 
It has been sought again and again to uphold the right 
of Federal supervision of the fisheries in navigable waters 
under the grant of power to regulate commerce; but this 
has been uniformly and repeatedly overruled by the 
courts. The possession of a United States ‘fishing 
license” has been set up as a defense for the violation of 
State regulations; but it has never been sustained. 
Legislation by Congress has been urged on the ground 
that citizens of each State should have equal rights with 
the citizens of the State in which the waters were, of 
fishing for floating fish in any navigable waters, but the 
power of Congress over the matter has been uniformly 
questioned and ultimately denied. Such a bill was intro- 
duced at the first session of the Forty-ninth Congress, 
and was numbered H.R. 4690. It was referred to the 
Committee on Judiciary and was reported adversely. 
The report was drawn by that able constitutional lawyer, 
J. Randolph Tucker of Virginia. The conclusion of that 
report is, “that the navigable waters within each State 
belong to it, subject to the paramount right of naviga- 
tion, for the benefit of its own people, and it has the 
right to secure the exclusive right of fishing in them to 
its own citizens by virtue of their common property in 
said waters, and that the citizens of other States have no 
constitutional right, nor can Congress confer any, to 
participate in fishing in them.” This right of the State 
