investigating the subject of the fishery for some time past, and the result of its inquiries seems to prove that it is inexhaustible, and that in the North Sea it is always harvest-time.* "When I told our fishmonger all about it, he said I was quite right about the 'big men' in London, and added, 'They will not let us have the fish under their own prices; and if it is so plentiful that they cannot sell it all at that, they have it thrown away, or carted off for manure; sometimes sunk in the river. If we could only get it here, my trade would be twice what it is, for, except sprats, the poor can seldom buy fish now.'1 "I asked him if the new Columbia Market 2 was of no use in making things easier, but he said, 'No'; that these salesmen had got that into their hands also; and were so rich that they would keep any number of markets in their own hands. A few hundred pounds sacrificed any day to keep up the prices they think well worth their while." Harvests, no * Not quite so, gentlemen of the Royal Commission. less than sales, and fishermen no less than salesmen, need regulation by just human law. Here is a piece of news, for instance, from Glasgow, concerning Loch Fyne:-"Owing to the permission to fish for herring by trawling, which not only scrapes up the spawn from the bottom, but catches great quantities of the fry, which are useless for market, and only fit for manure, it is a fact that, whereas Loch Fyne used to be celebrated for containing the finest herrings to be caught anywhere, and thousands and tens of thousands of boxes used to be exported from Inverary, there are not now enough caught there to enable them to export a single bor, and the quantity caught lower down the loch, near its mouth (and every year the herring are being driven farther and farther down) is not a tithe of what it used to be. Such a thing as a Loch Fyne herring (of the old size and quality) cannot be had now in Glasgow for any money, and this is only a type of the destruction which trawling, and too short close-time, are causing to all the west-coast fishing. Whiting Bay, Arran, has been rid of its whiting by trawling on the spawning coast opposite. The cupidity of careless fishers, unchecked by beneficial law, is here also 'killing the goose that lays the golden eggs,' and herring of any kind are very scarce and very bad in Glasgow, at a penny and sometimes twopence each. Professor Huxley gave his sanction to trawling, in a Government Commission, I am told, some years ago, and it has been allowed ever since. I will tell you something similar about the seal-fishing off Newfoundland, another time.” 3 [For a later reference to this passage, see Letter 88, § 4 (Vol. XXIX. p. 383).] 2 [In Bethnal Green; erected by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts at a cost of £200,000. "As a place of business in the way designed by its noble founder, Columbia Market from the very first has proved a comparative failure. . . . In April 1877 it was reopened as a meat market" (Cassell's Old and New London, vol. v. p. 506).] 3 [Huxley (who afterwards in 1881 succeeded Frank Buckland as Inspector of Fisheries) had been a member from 1863-65 of the Commission which had conducted an elaborate investigation into the fisheries of the United Kingdom, and had taken a large share in the preparation of the Report. This protracted investigation had convinced Huxley that the supply of fish in the deep sea was practically inexhaustible. . . . He was not, however, equally certain that particular XXVII. C 5. What do you think of that, by way of Free-trade? -my British-never-never-never-will-be-slaves,—hey? Freetrade; and the Divine Law of Supply and Demand; and the Sacred Necessity of Competition, and what not;-and here's a meek little English housewife who can't get leave, on her bended knees, from Sultan Costermonger, to eat a fresh herring at Yarmouth! and must pay three-halfpence apiece, for his leave to eat them anywhere;-and you, you simpletons-Fishermen, indeed!-Cod's heads and shoulders, say rather,―meekly receiving back your empty baskets; your miracle of loaves and fishes executed for you by the Costermongering Father of the Faithful, in that thimblerig manner! 6. "But haven't you yourself been hard against competition, till now? and haven't you always wanted to regulate prices?"1 Yes, my good SS. Peter and Andrew!-very certainly I want to regulate prices; and very certainly I will, as to such things as I sell, or have the selling of. I should like to hear of anybody's getting this letter for less than tenpence!—and if you will send me some fish to sell for you, perhaps I may even resolve that they shall be sold at twopence each, or else made manure of,-like these very costermongers; but the twopence shall go into your pockets-not mine; which you will find a very pleasant and complete difference in principle between his Grace the Costermonger and me; and, secondly, if I raise the price of a herring to twopence, it will be because I know that people have been in some way misusing them, or wasting them; and need to get fewer for a time; or will eat twopenny herrings at fashionable tables (when they wouldn't touch halfpenny areas of sea shore might not be exhausted. . . . His reports for 1882 and 1883, in which he gave elaborate accounts of the results of legislation on the Tyne and on the Severn, show that he keenly appreciated the necessity of regulating the Salmon Fisheries" Sir Spencer Walpole in Leonard Huxley's Life and Letters of Huxley, vol. ii. pp. 294-295 (1903 edition).] [See, for instance, on competition, Unto this Last, § 54 (Vol. XVII. p. 75); and on the regulation of prices, Time and Tide, § 80 (ibid. p. 386): on the latter point, compare Letter 58, § 17 (below, p. 433).] ones), and so give the servants no reason to turn up their noses at them.* I may have twenty such good reasons for fixing the price of your fish; but not one of them will be his Grace the Costermonger's. All that I want you to see is, not only the possibility of regulating prices, but the fact that they are now regulated, and regulated by rascals, while all the world is bleating out its folly about Supply and Demand. "Still, even in your way, you would be breaking the laws of Florence, anyhow, and buying to sell again?" Pardon me: I should no more buy your fish than a butcher's boy buys his master's mutton. I should simply carry your fish for you where I knew it was wanted; being as utterly your servant in the matter as if I were one of your own lads sent dripping up to the town with basket on back. And I should be paid, as your servant, so much wages (not commission, observe); making bargains far away for you, and many another Saunders Mucklebackit, just as your wife makes them, up the hill at Monkbarns; and no more buying the fish, to sell again, than she.1 7. "Well, but where could we get anybody to do this?" Have you no sons then ?-or, among them, none whom you can take from the mercy of the sea, and teach to serve you mercifully on the land? It is not that way, however, that the thing will be done. It must be done for you by gentlemen. They may stagger on perhaps a year or two more in their vain ways; but the day must come when your poor little honest puppy, whom his people have been wanting to dress up in a surplice, and call, "The to be Feared," that he might have pay enough, by tithe or tax, to marry a pretty girl, and live in a parsonage,2-some poor little honest wretch of a * In my aunt's younger days, at Perth, the servants used regularly to make bargain that they should not be forced to dine on salmon more than so many times a week. 1 [The Antiquary, ch. xi.] 2 [Compare Letter 40, § 14 (below, p. 76).] puppy, I say, will eventually get it into his glossy head that he would be incomparably more reverend to mortals, and acceptable to St. Peter and all Saints, as a true monger of sweet fish, than a false fisher for rotten souls; and that his wife would be incomparably more "lady-like -not to say Madonna-like—marching beside him in purple stockings and sabots-or even frankly barefoot-with her creel full of caller herring on her back, than in administering any quantity of Ecclesiastical scholarship to her Sunday-schools.1 8. "How dreadful-how atrocious!"-thinks the tender clerical lover. "My wife walk with a fish-basket on her back!" 2 Yes, you young scamp, yours. You were going to lie to the Holy Ghost, then, were you, only that she might wear satin slippers and be called a "lady"? Suppose, instead of fish, I were to ask her and you to carry coals. Have you ever read your Bible carefully enough to wonder where Christ got them from, to make His fire (when He was so particular about St. Peter's dinner, and St. John's 3)? Or if I asked you to be hewers of wood, and drawers of water;-would that also seem intolerable to you? My poor clerical friends, God was never more in the burning bush of Sinai than He would be in every crackling faggot (cut with your own hands) that you warmed a poor hearth with nor did that woman of Samaria ever give Him to drink more surely than you may, from every stream and well in this your land, that you can keep pure. 9. 20th Dec.-To hew wood-to draw water;-you think these base businesses, do you? and that you are noble, as well as sanctified, in binding faggot-burdens on poor men's backs, which you will not touch with your own fingers; *— 1 [For other new duties for the clergy, see Time and Tide, § 106 (Vol. XVII. p. 404).] 2 3 [Compare Letter 93, § 9 (Vol. XXIX. p. 475).] [John xxi. 9. The other Bible references in § 8 are Joshua ix. 21; Exodus iii. 2, xix. 18; and John iv. 7.] [See Matthew xxiii. 4.] and in preaching the efficacy of baptism inside the church,1 by yonder stream (under the first bridge of the Seven Bridges Road here at Oxford), while the sweet waters of it are choked with dust and dung, within ten fathoms from your font;—and in giving benediction with two fingers and your thumb, of a superfine quality, to the Marquis of B. ?2 Honester benediction, and more efficacious, can be had cheaper, gentlemen, in the existing market. Under my own system of regulating prices, I gave an Irishwoman twopence yesterday for two oranges, of which fruit-under pressure of competition-she was ready to supply me with three for a penny. "The Lord Almighty take you to eternal glory!" said she. You lawyers, also,-distributors, by your own account, of the quite supreme blessing of Justice,-you are not so busily eloquent in her cause but that some of your sweet voices might be spared to Billingsgate, though the river air might take the curl out of your wigs, and so diminish that æsthetic claim, which, as aforesaid, you still hold on existence. But you will bring yourselves to an end soon, —wigs and all,-unless you think better of it. 3 10. I will dismiss at once, in this letter, the question of regulation of prices, and return to it no more, except in setting down detailed law. Any rational group of persons, large or small, living in war or peace, will have its commissariat;-its officers for provision of food. Famine in a fleet, or an army, may sometimes be inevitable; but in the event of national famine, the officers of the commissariat should be starved the first. God has given to man corn, wine, cheese, and honey, all preservable for a number of years;-filled His seas with inexhaustible salt, and incalculable fish; filled the woods with beasts, the winds with birds, and the fields with fruit. Under these circumstances, the stupid human brute stands [The new church of St. Frideswide, opened in 1872.] 2 [See Letter 18, § 1 (Vol. XXVII. p. 304).] 3 [See Letter 1, § 6 (Vol. XXVII. p. 17).j |