It may fairly be supposed that if the people of this country could have been made to realize the immense money value of the great buffalo herds as they existed in 1870, a vigorous and successful effort would have been made to regulate and restrict the slaughter.  The fur seal of Alaska, of which about 100,000 are killed annually for their skins, yield an annual revenue to the Government of $100,000 and add $900,000 more to the actual wealth of the United States.  It pays to protect those seals, and we mean to protect them against all comers who seek their unrestricted slaughter, no matter whether the poachers be American, English, Russian, or Canadian.  It would be folly to do otherwise, and if those who would exterminate the fur seal by shooting them in the water will not desist for the telling, then they must by the compelling.

The fur seal is a good investment for the United States, and their number is not diminishing.  As the buffalo herds existed in 1870, 500,000 head of bulls, young and old, could have been killed every year for a score of years without sensibly diminishing the size of the herds.  At a low estimate these could easily have been made to yield various products worth $5 each, as follows:  Kobe, $2.50; tongue, 20 cents; meat of hindquarters, $2; bones, horns, and hoofs, 25 cents; total, $5.  And the amount annually added to the wealth of the United States would have been $2,500,000.

On all the robes taken for the market, say, 200,000, the Government could have collected a tax of 50 cents each, which would have yielded a sum doubly sufficient to have maintained a force of mounted police fully competent to enforce the laws regulating the slaughter.  Had a contract for the protection of the buffalo been offered at $50,000 per annum, ay, or even half that sum, an army of competent men would have competed for it every year, and it could have been carried out to the letter.  But, as yet, the American people have not learned to spend money for the protection of valuable game; and by the time they do learn it, there will be no game to protect.

Even despite the enormous waste of raw material that ensued in the utilization of the buffalo product, the total cash value of all the material derived from this source, if it could only be reckoned up, would certainly amount to many millions of dollars—­perhaps twenty millions, all told.  This estimate may, to some, seem high, but when we stop to consider that in eight years, from 1876 to 1884, a single firm, that of Messrs. J. & A. Boskowitz, 105 Greene street, New York, paid out the enormous sum of $923,070 (nearly one million) for robes and hides, and that in a single year (1882) another firm, that of Joseph Ullman, 165 Mercer street, New York, paid out $216,250 for robes and hides, it may not seem so incredible.

Had there been a deliberate plan for the suppression of all statistics relating to the slaughter of buffalo in the United States, and what it yielded, the result could not have been more complete barrenness than exists to-day in regard to this subject.  There is only one railway company which kept its books in such a manner as to show the kind and quantity of its business at that time.  Excepting this, nothing is known definitely.