78 CONFERENCE OF GOVERNORS. 



question which we have been asking the people of Maine and 

 trying to solve for thiriy years. I will now state what has been 

 done and what Maine is doing since thirty years ago. Why I 

 refer back to thirty years ago is that at that time Maine had no 

 lobster laws. It was legal to catch all the lobsters of any kind 

 desired. About twenty years ago we began to realize that we were 

 exterminating, so to speak, our lobsters. At that time the canning 

 factories were running in the State, and the Legislature of the 

 State thought it advisable to stop canning lobsters, thereby saving 

 the small lobsters. We continued along for some ten years more 

 without factories, but with the people and the fishermen still using 

 and consuming in different ways the same small lobsters that the 

 factories were deprived of the privilege of using. They went so 

 far as to not only sell the small lobsters for a very meagre price, 

 but to cook them and feed them to their hens. We did not there- 

 fore really stop the decrease in our lobsters until less than ten 

 years ago. About that time we adopted a law of 10% inches, and 

 we have been living up to that since. The 10%-inch law in our 

 opinion is as small as the lobster should be used, for the reason 

 that a lobster at 9 inches is so small that he is of very little value. 

 In the ordinary lobster not more than one-fourth of a pound of 

 meat can be taken from the shell. When that lobster sheds, which 

 he does every year at that age, he will increase from a 9-inch lob- 

 ster to a 10%-inch lobster, thereby being of a value at 9 inches 

 of from 5 to 8 cents, as compared with a value of 15 to 20 cents 

 at 10% inches, according to the season, etc. We think, as I said 

 before, that that lobster if killed at this time is killed in the most 

 vital period of his life, from a commercial standpoint, because any 

 financier would say that if you can get 300 per cent, by waiting six 

 months, which it is necessary to wait for the lobster to shed, it 

 would be a pretty good investment to save that lobster for these 

 six months. 



I will say, further, that with this law it was impossible for us, 

 up to two years ago, to get very good results as to the preservation 

 of small lobsters, because fishermen believed they had a right to 

 sell anything they caught. By talking and reasoning we think we 

 have got them to understand that by so doing they are working 

 against their own interests. Instead of using legal suasion, we 

 have tried moral suasion ; and to-day more than half of our lobster 

 fishermen believe the law to be right, and are living up to it and 

 helping the commission to enforce the law. In that way we are 

 getting better results; and to show you that we are doing all we 



