Philosophy

Citizens noted last week that the Atlantic Monthly for June carried an essay "In Praise of Izaak Walton" by no less a personage than Secretary of Commerce Herbert C. Hoover.

The vein was surprisingly light and fanciful coming from a chunky man so popularly associated with columned statistics, inanimate commodities and worried relief work. It postulated the pursuit of fish as a right rendered inalienable to "all men (and boys)" by the Declaration of Independence. It considered the mysteries and incantations of fishing, from spitting on angleworm segments to affixing trout cosmetics and bass liniments. It dwelt on piscatorial beatitudes in a manner that quickly revealed Mr. Hoover as twice the fisherman Calvin Coolidge is said to be, and in a style that revealed Mr. Hoover as a reader of Poet Edgar Guest and probably other standard authors.

His official self soon reminded Author Hoover to leave beatitudes and state his case, which he did with much clarity and despatch. The U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, he said, knows there are ten million U. S. fishermen. Its New Jersey reports suggest that each fisherman catches only 4.5 fish per annum. Mr. Hoover proposed an idea:

"I submit that each fisherman ought to catch at least 50 fish during the season. I should like more than that myself, but that ought to be demanded as a minimum . . . provided it includes one big one for purposes of indelible memory, conversation and historic record."

But how to provide 500,000,000 catchable fish? There are 291 federal, state and private game-fish hatcheries, turning out an average of 1,100,000,000 infant game fish annually. But infant game fish are prey to their cannibal elders. The loss of infant salmon is 99.77%. What is needed, what Mr. Hoover and his men have proved the value of, is fish nurseries, where infants may become fingerlings. Nurseries increase the infants' survival chances to "about a 50-50 go."

There are only 36 game-fish nurseries in the country; and Mr. Hoover's plea, as sportsman and public servant, was that more nurseries be established by clubs, by individuals, by the Izaak Walton League and by the states, to rear to maturity the millions of tiny fry which the Department of Commerce furnishes free.

Efficient, Mr. Hoover further recommended that all streams be surveyed and, where still possible, preserved from industrial pollution.

Philosophical, he concluded in a manner that should have earned him the thanks of many a citizen as well as of President Coolidge himself.

"We devote," he wrote, "vast departments of government and great agencies of commerce and industry, science and invention, to decreasing the hours of work, but we devote comparatively little to improving the hours of recreation. We associate joy with leisure. We have great machinery to produce joy, some of it destructive, some of it synthetic, some of it mass-produced. We go to chain theatres and movies; we watch somebody else knock a ball over the fence or kick it over the goal bar. I do that and I believe in it. I do, however, insist that no other organized joy has values comparable to the joys of the out-of-doors. We gain less from the other forms in moral stature, in renewed purpose in life, in kindness and in all the fishing beatitudes. We gain none of the constructive rejuvenating joy that comes from return to the solemnity, the calm and inspiration, of primitive nature. The joyous rush of the brook, the contemplation of the eternal flow of the stream, the stretch of forest and mountain, all reduce our egotism, soothe our troubles, and shame our wickedness. . . . I am for fish. Fishing is not so much getting fish as it is a state of mind and a lure of the human soul into refreshment. But it is too long between bites; we must have more fish in proportion to the water."