Up to the present time, however, although much ingenuity and expense have been lavished upon fish-ways by the various state fish commissions of this country, there has been little practical outcome from their use. Our dams are too high, and the shad and alewives, which we are especially desirous to carry over these obstructions, do not seem to take kindly to the narrow, tortuous defiles of the fish ladders.
The protection of fish by law is what legislators have been trying to effect for many centuries, and we are bound to admit that the success of their efforts has been very slight indeed. Protective legislation rarely succeeds. The statute books of each state are crowded with laws which no one understands, least of all the men who made them, and which the state governments are powerless to enforce. Every one remembers Whittier’s grand old hero, Abraham Davenport, the Connecticut statesman, who, “on a May day of that far old year 1780,” when the earth was shrouded in darkness, and he and all his colleagues in the State Assembly felt that the judgment day had come, stood up, “albeit with trembling hands and shaking voice, and read an act to amend an act to regulate the shad and alewife fisheries”—and then went on to rebuke those around for their fearfulness and desire to leave the post of duty. Connecticut is as much at a loss now as then to know how to regulate her shad and alewife fisheries. Under a republican form of government, restrictive laws are not popular, and money would never be voted to enforce such laws, which, without an extensive police force, would be powerless. Some one has sagely remarked that the salmon is an aristocratic fish, which can only thrive under the shadow of a throne. Many states now have laws protecting fresh water fish in the breeding season, and numerous game protective associations are laboring with some success for their enforcement. Sales of fish out of season are also successfully prevented in certain city markets.
The attempts to regulate the fisheries at the mouths of rivers, so that spawning fish may be allowed free passage for a few hours, generally from Saturday evening to Monday morning, are meeting with but little success.
Maryland and Virginia attempt to some extent the protection of their oyster beds, and the former state keeps up an expensive police organization. The oyster law is founded in ignorance, however, and the chief effort being to keep away fishermen from other states, for the benefit of their own, there are small results except frequent quarrels and occasional bloodshed.
Connecticut is making the experiment of giving to individuals personal title to submerged land, to be used in oyster culture, and this, perhaps, is the wisest step taken. Oyster production must soon cease to be a free grabbing enterprise, and be placed upon the same footing as agriculture, or the United States will lose its beloved oyster crop, and in this country, as in England, a fresh oyster will be worth as much as a new-laid egg. Great Britain has, at present, two schools of fishery economists, the one headed by Professor Huxley, opposed to legislation, save for the preservation of fish in inland waters, the other, of which Dr. Francis Day is the chief leader, advocating a most strenuous legal regulation of the sea fisheries. Continental Europe is by tradition and belief committed to the last named policy. In the United States, on the contrary, public opinion is generally antagonistic to fishery legislation, and our Commissioner of Fisheries, after carrying on for fourteen years investigations upon this very question, has not yet become satisfied that laws are necessary for the perpetuation of the sea fisheries, nor has he ever recommended to Congress enactment of any description. Just here we meet the test problem in fish culture. Many of the most important commercial fisheries of the world, the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the sardine fishery, the shad and alewife fishery, the mullet fishery, the salmon fishery, the whitefish fishery, the smelt fishery, and many others, owe their existence to the fact that once a year these fishes gather together in closely swimming schools, to spawn in shallow water, on shoals, or in estuaries and rivers. There is a large school of quasi economists, who clamor for the complete prohibition of fishing during spawning time. This demand demonstrates their ignorance. Deer, game birds, and other land animals may easily be protected in the breeding season, so may trout and other fishes of strictly local habits. Not so the anadromous and pelagic fishes. If they are not caught in the spawning season, they can not be caught at all. I heard a prominent fish culturist recently advocating before a committee of the United States Senate, the view that shad should not be caught in the rivers, because they came into the rivers to spawn. When asked what would become of our immense shad fisheries if this were done, he said that doubtless some ingenious person would invent a means of catching them at sea.
The fallacy in the argument of these men lies in the supposition that it is more destructive to the progeny of a given fish to kill it when its eggs are nearly ripe, than to kill the same fish eight or ten months earlier.
We must not, however, ignore the counter argument. Such is the mortality among fish that only an infinitesimal percentage attain to maturity. Möbius has shown that for every grown oyster upon the beds of Schleswig-Holstein, 1,045,000 have died. Only a very small percentage, perhaps not greater than this, of the shad or the smelt ever come upon the breeding grounds. Some consideration, then, ought to be shown to the individuals which have escaped from their enemies and have come up to deposit the precious burden of eggs. How much must they be protected?
Here the fish culturist comes in with the proposition “that it is cheaper to make fish so plenty by artificial means that every fisherman may take all he can catch, than to enforce a code of protective laws.”
The salmon rivers of the Pacific slope, and the shad rivers of the east, and the whitefish fisheries of the lakes, are now so thoroughly under control by the fish culturist, that it is doubtful if any one will venture to contradict his assertion. The question now is, whether he can extend his domain to other species.
Legislation and fish-ways, then, are, as yet, of little practical importance. Actually, they repeat the proverbial act of the clown who locked the stable door after his horse had been stolen. No one makes laws or builds fish-ways until he is of the decided opinion that the fish are pretty nearly gone.