manner of hindrance. The respectable, if vexatious, age of some of these embargoes has little meaning for men accustomed to wander along thousands of miles of riverside without encountering any description of obstacle or having to observe any laws other than those wisely framed to save the trout and black bass from extinction. 'The greatest good of the greatest number,' as it has been somewhat loosely termed, is an ideal towards which every civilised community must eventually strive. The phrase is not altogether a happy one, as it is liable to misinterpretation, and has lately been under the cloud of socialism; but it points to a goal from which we may not turn away, and our approach to that goal is more retarded by unfairly exercised riparian ownership than by any other form of landed property. Rarely has public opinion been more bitterly aroused than by the claims made by individuals to presumptive rights, either upheld by charter or sanctioned by usage, over Thames backwaters, which had been regarded as the birthright of the people. The late Mr J. E. Vincent, taking an extreme case of abuse, has much to say on behalf of the riparian owner which captivates the æsthetic mind, but any wide application of such principles of ownership might in these days be hazardous to property, and compromise will be found the safer course for all parties. It is a quarter of a century since Congress dealt summarily with a parallel problem by paying princely compensation to the owners of Goat Island and other riverside property and thus giving Niagara River into the keeping of the American nation for all time, or for as much of it as matters. To free the Thames by such means would be too costly an undertaking for a Government already heavily burdened with more pressing schemes for the benefit of posterity. Yet the public liberty must somehow be safeguarded, and a little criticism does no harm in keeping the Conservancy alive to the gravity of its obligations. Of the forensic aspect of rivers, however, this passing notice must suffice.

Time was when the Thames was a notable salmon river, but it is never likely to renew its faded laurels, and indeed its last recorded salmon were taken at Boulter's Lock as far back as 1821. I was with Lord Desborough on the occasion of his turning the first

consignment of young salmon into the river near Teddington, and I remember that even at the time he reluctantly took a gloomy view of his public-spirited experiment; nor has there unfortunately been any reason to modify that view in the years that have since elapsed. Though, however, the Thames has but historic interest as a salmon river, its trout are famous, and its coarse fish varied and abundant, so that it shares with the Trent and Lee the affection of an enormous body of anglers.

It is to the Tweed that we must turn if we wish for an illustration not only of a salmon river, but also of some of the causes which have contributed to the decline of the fishing. Its common title of Border river rests on only fifteen miles of its winding course, and few who have wandered along the banks of this

'Wan water from the Border hills'

would call it anything but a Scotch stream. Yet something of its dual nationality is realised by any one who kills his salmon in sight of the embowered ruin of Norham, where once an English king held high state to award the crown of Scotland, for he may rise his fish in one country and gaff it in the other. There is in that pleasant frontier stretch of this lovely river no difficulty in realising the old red Border feuds in which savage Picts retaliated on barbarous Britons, as set forth in Sir Herbert Maxwell's admirable biography of his favourite stream. Tweed salmon are no longer what they were, and indeed the river itself is changed for the worse, being nowadays a late or back-end' river, in which the spring fishing is of little account. This deplorable result has been brought about by artificial causes, and among them, besides over-netting and poaching, none has been more fatally operative than the excessive farming of the Tweed valley, which draws off the water and stems the floods which formerly helped the spring fish in their ascent. As a result, no more than six or seven thousand salmon are now caught annually in a river which, in 1816, yielded to the nets no fewer than 54,041. The deterioration of the Tweed has, from first to last, been the work of man. Even its lateness' is a condition wholly at variance with the other east-flowing

streams of Scotland, and to regard it a natural change is contrary to reason, as we are told by the author of a recent monograph, in which the past and present of the river are strikingly contrasted.*

The sporting side of the subject is one, however, with which I must reluctantly deal but briefly, else it might have been interesting to compare some of our exhausted rivers, victims of over-fishing, poaching, pollution, drainage, steam traffic, and other evils to which rivers are heir, and those vast virgin waterways of the New World, with their wonderful resources to all intents and purposes unimpaired. Even some of these, however, already show signs of a change for the worse. The Hudson still yields, it is true, a million shad every year to the nets, but the sturgeon leaps more rarely from its surface than of yore. When I visited the fish-wheels of the Columbia River, I was informed that the catches had been increasingly poor for several seasons, and that the legislatures of Washington and Oregon were much exercised by the conflicting claims of the wheelmen near the Dalles, and the netsmen of the estuary at Astoria. There was, in fact, between these factions a rivalry not unlike that met with on our own coasts between the trawlers and line-fishermen, and the need of a compromise, so as not unduly to favour one industry at the expense of the other, was a very delicate problem.

In rivers, as in humanity, genius and patience are synonymous. The keynote of the river's being is its eternity. We know that there were not always rivers, but, once the ice relaxed its grip, they came into being, and we cannot picture an age when they will cease to be. Perhaps this strangely alluring aspect of these running waters is most evident in the great rivers of the Western Hemisphere. We cannot picture the Ganges or Euphrates without a teeming population on their banks; but the romantic Hudson, the broad Columbia, the furious Niagara, the lethargic Mississippi, these we have no great difficulty in imagining in their unhistoric isolation, though it has taken little more than a century of industrial enterprise to transform their banks, previously trodden only

* W. L. Calderwood, The Salmon Rivers and Lochs of Scotland."

by the Indian and his squaw, into hammer-shaken shipyards, screeching lumber mills and the junctions of great railroads that stretch between the oceans. These rivers do not, it is true, come down to us like the Nile or Jordan, charged with the sacred memories of the cradle of the race. Yet their appeal is not to be resisted by those who set more store by the lands of to-morrow than by those of yesterday, whose pleasure is in hope and not in retrospect; and the traveller who keeps an open mind for all manner of impressions, even though he love best the streams which run out of the past, may yet derive a measure of enjoyment from the spectacle of those which stretch into a future no less pregnant.

They stand, these American streams, for all the functional and spiritual nature of river life; and Americans, justly proud of their heritage of waters, have done what they could to preserve from destruction such beauty and character as are inevitably threatened by modern industry. Where else can one name a river more national than the Hudson, or more apt to illustrate the twofold change from source to mouth, the broadening of gentle rivulets to a great estuary, and the artificial transformation by the hand of a commercial generation? Three names are inseparably linked with this romantic river. Verrazano, the Florentine, discovered it more than a century before the phlegmatic Stuyvesant planted his Bowery on a site since occupied by thieves' kitchens. Hendrik Hudson gave his name to it in 1609. Yet it is a third name, that of Washington Irving, the bard of Knickerbocker days, which will come to the mind of every English reader whenever the Hudson is mentioned, for it was he who, before he went home to die on its banks, bestowed immortality on his favourite river, peopling its creeks with beings as fanciful as Rip Van Winkle, with whose aid he threw undying glamour over the Catskills and made them for all time the shrine of good Americans in search of home-made romance. It is from that period that the Hudson derives its glory, from a time when no sky-scrapers pierced the clouds that hung low over New Amsterdam, where stolid Dutchmen smoked their long pipes on shady stoeps, shivering over tales of the spectre ships that sailed on dark nights over the dreary waters of the Tappan Zee, and watching the Vol. 213.-No. 424.

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wild duck pitch on their nests where now the transatlantic liners crowd the busy quays. Those old settlers of the Hudson valley led a life that was austere and a little grey, yet not wanting in a simple, sober beauty that has long gone out of fashion in a city given over to hustle and trusts. The sweet peace of the Hudson is no more. Side-wheelers and stern-wheelers, swifter but less beautiful than Irving's sloop, stir its troubled waters to their depths, and the white wings of the once busy fleet are for ever folded. The new era was inaugurated more than a hundred years ago, on the day when Fulton's 'Clermont' made her first voyage from New York to Albany-one hundred and fifty miles in thirty-two hours—an apparition so disquieting to eyes accustomed only to the zigzag course of sailing craft that a farmer of the neighbourhood fled home panic-stricken and blurted out to his good wife that he had just seen 'the devil going up-river in a sawmill'! To-day the Hudson is so overrun in its lower reaches by the argosies of a generation which sets hurry higher than beauty, that the survival of its romance is a mighty tribute to the genius and imagination of the writer who immortalised its older phase. This transformation, helped by natural causes which operate from source to mouth, may be appreciated in a day's travel, when it will be seen that below Troy the stream loses that homely beauty which clings about Irving's pictures of it, and resembles rather an inlet of the ocean. Yet, after all, the same may be said of other rivers no less beautiful out of sight of the sea. Our own Thames, below Tilbury, suggests the rural drainage of the Cotswolds as little as does the Hudson, at New York, that of the Adirondacks.

If the Hudson fails in its response to the ruling mood of the American nation, it is in counting for so little in the story of exploration, in not pointing the way westward to that great Beyond which beckoned alike the voyageur, the missionary, the trapper, and the fortuneseeker of other days. Such a stream, luring men from the overcrowded cities of the East to the greater spaces in the sunset, is the Columbia, which tempted the pioneers to emulate the audacity and dogged patience with which it had carved its way through mountain and forest towards the Pacific slope. And thus it led them to a land