What is everybody's business is nobody's business. Probably that is why the science and art of conserving rivers has made such haphazard progress. Now at length, however, there is hope. Any river that is equipped with storage and passes will speedily recover. I have dwelt on details of the subject for reasons which must have become manifest. When all is said and done, no class in particular is to blame for the sad disorder revealed in not a few of the passages in Chapters vii., viii., and ix. Agricultural drainage changed the character of many rivers. Waters that long ago used to be of considerable flow all the year round became raging torrents in time of rain, and rather stagnant brooks in time of drought. That was the origin of all the evils. Many waters had become scarcely fit to be haunts of salmon. Even the largest rivers were seriously affected. Places in them that of old must have been scarcely noticeable obstructions became impassible to the fish in time of drought. How can we wonder that the state of affairs was regarded as hopeless; that the lower proprietors saw no harm in taking all the salmon that came their way, that manufacturers were allowed to cast their refuse into the waters, and that towns disposed of sewage by the same means? In some cases the rivers, as salmon rivers, were, by common consent, regarded as doomed. They were no longer as Nature meant them to be, and there was no inkling that they might become so once again. The unexpected, however, has happened. It actually is possible to put the rivers into something like the state of nature. When the possibilities of the storage system are realised, we shall soon see an end to public indifference and to the conflict of private interests. These evils will readily remove themselves when it is known that the rivers can be made to flow brimful and equably even at the height of summer. They arose from reasonable despair, and will disappear at the touch of reasonable hope. Already, most notably in England, as is shown in Chapter ix., there is a marked awakening. Even among those who are not sportsmen, there are many signs of a growing sense that the rivers should be full and pure; and there never was a time when those who do fish, a class becoming larger and more influential year by year, were so anxious that opportunities for sport should not be wantonly destroyed. Storage, which solves the fundamental problem, will lead to a speedy solution of all the incidental difficulties. Whenever they have a fair chance salmon multiply with remarkable rapidity and hatcheries are unnecessary. It seems not too much to hope, then, that practically every salmon river in the kingdom will ere long be as good as it was a century ago.