ARGUMENTS AGAINST LEGISLATIVE INTERFERENCE TO ENFORCE SHORT PAYMENTS
It is maintained on various grounds that the provisions suggested for the prevention of truck in other trades cannot be advantageously applied to fishing. Most of the merchants are averse to short pays, and I cannot say that the fishermen themselves are in general desirous to have them introduced. I endeavoured to ascertain from the witnesses examined whether there is any insuperable obstacle to the introduction of ready-money payments for fish.
The objections may be reduced, to two classes:-
SHORT PAYMENTS 'IMPRACTICABLE'.
1. That payment of the fish on delivery would be 'impracticable;' which is explained to mean, (1) that it would necessitate the employment of more highly paid factors at the stations, and the conveyance of considerable sums of money for distances of many miles, there being no banks in Shetland except at Lerwick; and (2) that the settlement with the men would take up a long time and detain them from the prosecution of the fishing, which, during the summer months, requires incessant activity.
On the other hand, it may be said that every cargo of fish is now received at the station by a factor employed by the curer, who weighs the fish and enters the weight of each kind in his fish-book. If the price of the fish were fixed, there could be no difficulty in ascertaining the money share of each man in a particular haul, or in the catch of a week or a fortnight, as is done in Fife and in some of the Wick fisheries; and the factor might either pay it in cash or give an order, which the fisherman or one of his family could cash at the merchant's counting-house. If the price were left to be fixed at the end of the season, the law might require payment of a proportion of the estimated price, as it does now in the case of the Northern whale fishery.
The argument, that the settlement would take up an intolerable time, and prevent crews from getting to sea in favourable weather, is sometimes fortified by the assertion that the people of Shetland are singularly defective in arithmetic. Even if we assume this statement to be correct, there is so little intricacy in a calculation of the price of 18 cwt. of fish at 6s. 6d. per cwt., and dividing the sum among five or six men, that a very low arithmetical faculty would not be severely taxed in checking it. There is little doubt that in stating this objection, which scarcely deserves refutation, the simple settlement at landing a cargo of fish, or at paying cash for a week's fishing, is confounded with the very different kind of settlement to which the witnesses are accustomed at present, and in which all the transactions of a year in fish, cattle, meal, tea, clothing, soap, fishing lines, and a hundred other things, have to be gone over in detail, and checked generally, on one side at least, from memory.
SHORT PAYS 'NOT ADVANTAGEOUS TO FISHERMEN'
2. It is maintained that a system of short payments in cash would not be advantageous to the fishermen, because, in the first place, their improvident habits would lead them to spend their receipts at once, so that at the end of the year they would have nothing left with which to pay their rents, and no means of living in the spring, when the meal from their crofts is exhausted; and, in the second place, because it is inconsistent with their being paid according to the price actually realized for the fish, which is commonly higher than the 'beach price' during the season, or the market price at the time when agreements for the summer fishing are made.
The first of these reasons is felt and stated by some of the fishermen themselves. But are Shetland fishermen more improvident than other people similarly situated would be? Under the present system of credit transactions, indeed, it would be strange if a part of them were not careless and extravagant, and it would not be strange if a great majority were hopelessly improvident and insolvent. No man is more likely to waste his means than he who never knows how much he has to spend; and this general truth is not likely to fail in its application to men following a precarious calling in which there are great runs of luck, and who have been brought up from their earliest years to expect their employers to supply their pressing wants in times of adversity. But the objectors themselves assert, and there is no reason to doubt, that a very considerable proportion of the people have saved money in spite of the influences under which they live, and have, for their rank in life, large deposits in the banks. If many of them are careless and improvident, that is a reason, not for continuing, but for altering a system which is admirably conceived for promoting extravagance and recklessness about money. If some Shetlanders are improvident, it is the system which has made them so; and if it be a fact that so many have saved money, it proves that under a better system the people of Shetland would compare favourably with those of any other district in frugality and foresight. If the fisherman had his money in his hand, it is not likely that he would forget rent day and the time of short supplies which he has often to pass through in spring.