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with cheap and healthful food, should in substance say to 
a tax-paying citizen, ‘‘ You must not sell your artificially 
reared fish to our people until such time as Dame Nature 
can furnish us the same article.’”’ By its creation and 
maintenance of a Fish Commission, empowered to restock 
the streams, the State recognizes the desirability that its 
people should have an abundant, cheap food ; and by its 
imposition of a tax on private fishcultural establishments it 
says, in effect, that the business is legitimate ; but all this 
is unsaid when it denies to the taxed industry the right to 
sell its products in accordance with the demands of the 
market. Itis worse than taxation without representation, 
itis taxation with strangulation. The error consisted at 
the time of framing the laws in not recognizing the vast 
possibilities of fishculture for supplying the market de- 
mand, in not distinguishing between wild trout and those 
artiticially raised. Some of the States promptly modified 
their laws. But it is amazing that others persist in refus- 
ing to distinguish between State property and private 
property. If the expansion of fishculture so earnestly 
wished and worked for is ever to be realized in America, 
this stumbling block of over-protection must first be re- 
moved. Asastep toward the consummation of this end I 
offer for your consideration the following : 
At a meeting of the American Fisheries Society, held in 
Chicago, May 15, 1893, the following preamble and re- 
solutions were presented : 
Whereas, The cultivation and raising of trout as a food 
product being now an established industry in many of the 
States, furnishing employment to individuals, profitable 
investment for capital, and food for the people, and where- 
as the business is capable of great expansion, thereby 
furnishing the people with a food product of the highest 
class, and whereas the object of this Society is to encour- 
age the cultivation of useful fishes as a food product, and 
