Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/397

Rh Man's eagerness has so nearly exhausted the easily exploited resources that fostering care is essential to the best development and use of the sea bottom. Left to the chance of nature and subject to despoilment by every one without hindrance, these areas would remain barren wastes. Law and government are for the benefit of humanity, not to foster waste. The aim of international law is the welfare and happiness of the general society of mankind, and this would not be promoted by a policy which would keep the sea bottoms forever unproductive. The reason for the freedom of the high seas is the freedom of intercourse and commerce between the states, the seas being the common highway; and a recognition of the occupancy by an individual nation of so much of the sea bottom as it may actually improve and develop does not impair the perfect freedom of navigation by vessels of all nations, as this occupancy is subordinate to the right of navigation and fishery and can not be exercised in derogation thereof.

Necessarily in the recognition of this extension of jurisdiction, the interests of the various states must be carefully guarded, and especially of those near the areas to be exploited. Within general limits, the right of exploitation and development must be reserved to the nation within whose sphere of influence the particular area is situated, for it would be manifestly unjust, indeed extremely unwise, to establish a principle by which a nation could appropriate to itself a resource off the shores of a less enterprising country. The privilege of exploiting the sea bottom in the whole of the Gulf of California, for instance, should undoubtedly rest with the Mexican people; Ceylon and British India should have control of that in the Gulf of Manar, and the riparian states should possess those in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

However we may view the protective needs of the migratory and the bottom fishes, the situation is quite different with respect to the great marine vertebrates, the seals, walrus, manatees, sea otters and many species of whales. These animals are approaching practical exhaustion with great rapidity, and prompt action seems necessary if they are to be preserved from extinction.

This is not the language of exaggeration. Under the influence of the bounty of $25 which industrial use offers for the life of a fur seal, $300 for a sea otter and $8,000 for an arctic whale, these animals are passing away far more rapidly than is generally realized, the entire annual product of sea otters throughout the world now approximating only 200 and of arctic whales less than 100 each year. The timid whalebone whales have been swept from the navigable seas and are nowhere to be found except in the most remote ice fields of the frigid zones.

The walrus are almost exterminated in the seas north of Europe; and where they were formerly so plentiful in Bering Sea, they are to be