12 
Any attempt to transfer to private ownership that which 
has always been regarded as the common property of the 
public invariably arouses intense opposition and the present 
case was no exception to the rule. Whether it be true or 
not, as it has frequently been charged, that the opposition to 
the measure was fostered and encouraged by those whose 
financial profit lay in the perpetuation of the existing order, 
it is certain that a great number of natural-rock oystermen 
of the State believed, or claimed to believe, that oyster culti- 
vation on barren bottom was an impossibility and that any 
system of leasing whatever, if it were to be successful, must 
necessarily include natural rock. ‘This meant to them that 
they would be forbidden to tong and dredge at will over the 
areas which they and their fathers before them had worked 
and which they regarded as belonging to them by God-given 
right. 
The advocates of a leasing system were willing to ‘concede 
that the natural rocks should remain permanently the prop- 
erty of the natural-rock oystermen. They argued, however, 
that it was possible to grow oysters upon ground which up 
to that time had not produced them, and they supported this 
argument by pointing to actual, practical, commercially suc- 
cessful work of this sort in states to the north, in Virginia, 
in France, in England and in Japan. They pointed in addi- 
tion to the local beds which had been developed from abso- 
lutely barren bottom by the deposit of cullings and they 
pointed also to the extension of the boundaries of local beds 
through the spreading of shells due to the operation of 
dredges. Whether their educational campaign failed because 
it was not properly brought before the oystermen themselves 
or whether it failed because the prejudices and distrust of the 
oystermen were so deep-seated as to render them unable to 
consider or at least unwilling to admit the facts presented 
must remain, of course, a matter of opinion. It is enough for 
our purpose that the educational campaign failed and that 
the oystermen remained then, as many of them remain today, 
fixed in the belief that the cultivation of oysters on barren 
bottom is an impossibility. 
