us dealers who get collecting permits as
scientific men, to poison, to shooting from power boats or with swivel
guns, to that most diabolical engine of all murderers--the Maxim
silencer,--to hounding and crusting, to egging and nefarious pluming,
to illegal netting and cod-trapping, and last, but emphatically not
least, to any and every form of wanton cruelty. The next step may be
to provide against the misuse of aeroplanes.

I believe it would be well worth while, from every point of view, to
publish the laws, or at all events a digest of them, in all the
principal papers. Even educated people know little enough; and no one,
even down the coast, at the trading posts, or in Newfoundland, should
have the chance of pleading ignorance. "We don't know no law here"
ought to be an impossible saying two years hence. And we might
remember that the Newfoundlanders who chiefly use it are really no
worse than others, and quite as amenable to good laws impartially
enforced. They have seen the necessity of laws at home, after
depleting their salmon rivers, deer runs and seal floes to the danger
point. And there is no reason to suppose that an excellent population
in so many ways would be any harder to deal with in this one than the
hordes of poachers and sham sportsmen much nearer home.

Of course, everything ultimately turns on the enforcement of the laws.
And I still think that two naturalists and twenty men afloat and the
same number ashore, with double these numbers when Hudson bay and the
Arctic are included, would be enough to patrol Labrador
satisfactorily, if they were in touch with local and leasehold wardens
and with foresters, if the telegraph was used only on their side, if
they and the general inspector were all of the right kind, and if the
whole service was vigorously backed up at headquarters. Two fast motor
cruisers and suitable means of making the land force also as mobile as
possible are _sine qua non_.

The Ungava peninsula, Hudson bay and Arctic together would mean a
million square miles for barely a hundred men. But, with close
co-operation between sea and land, they could guard the sanctuaries as
efficiently as private wardens guard leased limits, watch the outlets
of the trade, and harry law-breakers in the intervening spaces. Of
course, the system will never be complete till the law is enforced
against both buyers and sellers in the market. But it is worth
enforcing, worth it in every way. And the interes