REGULATION OF THE SEA-FISHERIES BY LAW. 101 



should pass an act to prohibit these modes of fishing that have been 

 called novel and improper, what would be the practical workings "I » 



This, then, was the great point in the case — not what injury had been 

 done and was still being done to the private rights of individuals, nor 

 what the hazard to the fisheries, but what harm would the prohibition 

 of the traps do to the monopolists — what was to be the effect on the 

 Gloucester fishery, on the Wm. L. Bradley Manufacturing Company at 

 Weymouth, on the Pacific Guano Company at Wood's Hole, on the 

 Cape Cod Railroad Company, who had asserted, and who were defend- 

 ing what they called their right to all the fishes they could, by any 

 means, catch. 



Even supposing, for the sake of the argument, that these wholesale 

 methods of taking fish do not, on the whole, injure the fisheries, by 

 what right does any man, or set of men, take all the fishes of the sea 

 which they can catch as his or theirs % Have the public no rights ? Has 

 not every individual some rights which these monopolists are bound to ' 

 respect % 



I wonder that the great injustice which is done to public and private 

 rights by trapping did not move the legislatures of both Massachusetts 

 and Rhode Island to prompt and immediate action to prevent it. No 

 other so great public right could be trampled upon, no other private 

 right would be so despised. 



I wonder that the people have so long consented to be robbed, and 

 for no better reason than that large moneys are invested in the busi- 

 ness. 



Are the fishermen to be driven from their fishing- grounds, are the 

 people to be deprived of food, that a lew men may be made rich out of 

 the public treasury of the sea? And has he or they only the right to 

 catch fish who can afford the extensive and costly apparatus of the 

 trappers % 



One would suppose it could hardly be necessary at this late day to 

 discuss this question. 



The right of every man to catch fish in the bays and arms of the sea 

 has long since been settled. The denial of the right of any man to 

 catch fish to the injury of the right of any other man has been main- 

 tained from the earliest history of the country. 



I marvel at the presumption of those Avho, in derogation of every 

 other man's right, stand boldly before the law-makers of the laud, 

 and ask to be protected in their unlawful business, or not hindered in 

 pursuing it. Is it not a matter of surprise that these men should go 

 before these legislative committees and parade the extent of their 

 plunder as a justification of the robbery itself i See the hundreds of 

 thousands of barrels of fish which they testified annually to have taken 

 in their traps for market at home and abroad, for fertilizing phosphates, 

 for bait for the mackerel and cod fisheries, the profits of which they 

 pocketed, and to which they had no legal or moral right if their modes 

 of fishing deprived the poorer fishermen of what was legally and morally 

 theirs. 



There can be little doubt remaining that these novel methods of fish- 

 ing stop the fish from going into their accustomed waters to spawn : 

 that they prevent their going, as was their wont, into the bays and 

 rivers, and that they thus prevent those who live upon the banks of 

 these waters from taking the fish as they formerly did, or compel them 

 to longer voyages and to more expensive apparatus. What Mr. Atwood 

 speaks of, therefore, as the practical working of any act to protect these 

 fisheries or these fishermen, is, in fact, the practical wrong and in- 



