SALMON-FISHERY OF SCOTLAND. 77 



little repute in our Courts, and law is everything. Every case 

 which comes into Court is made to turn upon some sophism, or 

 subtlety, or nicety, or chimerical distinction of what is called 

 law ; and justice, the end and object of law, the very thing for 

 which law has been made, and with which, as we have before 

 observed, sound law is never at variance, is utterly disregarded ; 

 of which the case before iis, with the quibbling distinction, 

 between an illegal mode and an illegal act of fishing, and still 

 more quibbling assertion, that what the Crown may do, all 

 others may also do, is a clear instance. 



When the case came before the Court, we would have ex- 

 pected that, instead of having recourse to such quibbles, it 

 would have been said to the defender, " Sir, the river heritors 

 hold their properties by grants from the Crown, and under 

 these grants they have been in the immemorial possession of 

 the whole of the fish which pass up through the channel of the 

 estuary : you wish to appropriate to yourself a portion of these 

 fish, of which they have been in immemorial possession, while 

 you admit that YOU have no right to them. A man who ap- 

 propriates to himself what he has no right to, commits an act 

 of THEFT, be it on whom it may. If the salmon belong to the 

 Crown, he steals the property of the Crown ; if to the Crown's 

 grantees, he steals their property. In either view, he is to 

 every intent and purpose a thief, and this is what you wish us 

 judges to protect you in. If, as Erskine states, the fish con- 

 stitute the estate of the owners of the fishings, it would be a 

 great absurdity to say that they have no right of property in 

 what constitutes their estate. There is not a salmon taken by 

 you, which, if not so taken, the tacksman of the upper fisheries 

 would not be as sure of as if it were in his ice-house.* You 

 take what may belong professedly to the Crown, but what is 

 substantially, or, in FACT, the property of the owners of the 

 fishery ; but, in either view, you take what does not belong to 

 YOU. Sitting here as judges, bound by our OATHS, to adminis- 



* We once tied a bit of tape round the tail of a fish taken at a lower fishery, 

 and allowed it to escape and sent off a man immediately to one of the upper 

 rivers to which we knew it belonged, but before the man reached the river, the 

 fish was caught there, with the tape about it. 



