I had got thus far last night, and posted down again early this morning to the market, which has a sombre kind of attraction for me. Only two boats in, with light catches of from one and a half to two lasts each. The first sold at £5: 5s., which price the second boat refused. Theirs were a first-rate lot, and they shouldn’t go under £6, for which they were holding out when I had to leave, and there seemed to be a general belief that they would get it. This was puzzle enough for any man, to see under his own eyes the same fish sold on three consecutive summer days for £7:10s., £1:10s., and £5:5s.!--a sort of thing no fellow can understand. To add to my bewilderment, I learnt that at Great Grimsby yesterday (the £1:10s. day here) the last had sold for upwards of £15! So that my old salt’s view as to the telegraph doesn’t quite hold water, and the two smacks which shook the water off their bows and sailed for Hartlepool, may have made a good day’s work of it, after all. Indeed, a sailor on the quay declared that they had sold at £5, so that, after paying £2 apiece for the tug, which had towed them all the way, they still got £3 a last, or double the price they would have realised at Whitby. “So it comes to this, that the more fish you catch, the less pay you get,” I said to my informant. “Yes,” he seemed to think that was mostly the case, adding that to his mind it was the railways that made all the money out of fish-- Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes. It is an old story enough, but scarcely less true or sad in 1888 than when most of the world’s hardest work was done by slaves. However there are, happily, signs in the air that, here in England at any rate, we are waking up to the truth, that if we can find no better way of organising industry than competition run mad, we are going to have real bad times. Royal Commissions on the sweating system; Toynbee Hall interventions in great strikes; co-operative effort springing up all over the country, and finding its most zealous and devoted advocates at least as much amongst those who don’t work with their hands as those who do,--all go to prove that the reign of king _laissez faire_, with his golden rule of “cash payment the sole _nexus_ between man and man,” is over. Indeed, our danger may soon be from too much meddling with and mothering industry. Nevertheless, no one can spend a few hours on the quay here in the herring season and not long for some one--scholar, philanthropist, political economist (new style), co-operator--to come along and teach these fine fellows to read their sphinx riddle. It would not be, surely, such a difficult task as it looks at first sight. There is no need to begin with the vast herring-fishing industry, with its distant markets at Billingsgate, Liverpool, and Manchester. The reform might begin at once on a modest scale. Beside the herrings, one sees every morning other fish lying on the quay--skate, cod, ling, whiting,