SECTION VII. 

 ME KENNEDY'S COMMITTEE. 



All that glisters is not gold. 



SHAKESPEARE. 



" Le monde est plein de fous, 



Et qui veut n'en voir, 

 Doit se nicher dans un trou, 

 Et casser son miroir." 



French Aiitkor. 



THE proceedings of this Committee have made a considerable 

 impression upon the public mind. To call these proceedings 

 evidence would be ridiculous. They convey merely the opi- 

 nions of the witnesses on a subject in which the personal inte- 

 rest of the whole of them was more or less concerned. Disin- 

 terested investigation in the leader of the Committee, or 

 impartial statements on the part of the witnesses, we hold, 

 therefore, to be entirely out of the question. Some of the 

 witnesses, though not upon oath, spoke truth ; others stated 

 mere fictions and absurdities, to promote their own views ; 

 the whole together forming such a mass of contradiction, that 

 any man, personally unacquainted with the nature of the 

 salmon-fishery, must rise from a perusal of it quite at a loss 

 what to think of the matter. To show the spirit in which the 

 business was carried, we shall cite what was afterwards stated 

 in the Committee on the Bill by Mr Sheppard, an Irish gentle- 

 man, who had been sent over by the proprietors of the rivers 

 in Ireland, and who had been previously examined in Mi- 

 Kennedy's Committee. The Committee ask him, 



H 



