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.