70 SALMON-FISHERY OF SCOTLAND. 



utes interpose their protection, and the coast heritors, who, as 

 we have said, never paid one farthing for their fishings, exclaim, 

 What injustice ! Only think of the hardship, the cruelty, of 

 being thus prevented from appropriating to ourselves the pro- 

 perties of the river heritors, which, having always paid rents, were 

 purchased many of them at high prices, and have been possessed 

 for time immemorial, just as we have possessed our lands. 

 Here the Sovereign might tell them, You got your grants under 

 the idea that they would do no harm to other properties why 

 else do you suppose your applications were rendered public by 

 advertisement ? and rest assured, that the motive from which 

 that was done, would, had stake-nets been foreseen, have pre- 

 vented the grants being given at all. You must, therefore, fish 

 according to the usage of the fishery at the period 'the grants 

 were made, for long usage constitutes law ; and you have no 

 right to use the grants for the purpose of spoliation, and trans- 

 ferring properties to yourselves, which were never intended to 

 be given to you. Certes, in every view the clamour of the 

 coast heritors is ridiculous, as well as unjust ; but they have 

 received a degree of support from the courts of law, which has 

 in many instances proved most disastrous to the river fishings. 

 A volume would scarcely contain all the acts of injustice which 

 we could relate on the subject, since the introduction of fixed 

 nets into the fishery. The greatest depredations have been 

 committed on the established fisheries, from a dependence by 

 the depredators on the delays of the law, regardless of what the 

 event might be, provided the produce of the fishery could, in 

 the mean time, be carried off. Illegal spoliation of property 

 became, in short, a legal speculation fostered by the conduct 

 of the Court in refusing interdicts as if there could be any 

 hardship in forcing parties to continue the usage of the fishery 

 until the legality of the new modes of fishing, that is, of the 

 new fishing-engines, which can never, in any instance, be per- 

 mitted without injustice, should be ascertained. 



The salmon-fishery now constitutes so large a portion of the 

 property of Scotland, and the law on the subject seems to be so 

 ill understood, every new case which occurs undergoing the 

 same tedious course of litigation, as if the judges were groping 



