SALMON-FISHERY OF SCOTLAND. 133 



Halliday admits in the Committee that, " if the night is very 

 dark you cannot see the nets" Accordingly, in a dark night the 

 crew of the boat belonging to the witness we have mentioned, 

 had, as we said, been lost upon one of these engines in the frith 

 of Dornoch, clinging, after the boat was upset, to the stakes, 

 till they were relieved. We wonder what the Lord Mayor of 

 London would do if both sides of the Thames were covered 

 with machinery of this description ? He would no doubt order 

 its immediate demolition ; and are not the inhabitants in the 

 remote parts of the kingdom entitled to the same protection ? 

 Perhaps not. 



The only question seems to be, whether they may remove 

 such dangerous nuisances viafacti, or must involve themselves 

 in endless litigation in the Courts of Law for that purpose. 

 Mr Chitty, a celebrated English Counsel, as appears in the 

 proceedings of the Committee, gave it as his opinion, that an 

 obstruction of a much less formidable and dangerous descrip- 

 tion, which deterred the fish from ascending, might be legally 

 removed by ANY person, as a public nuisance, without an 

 application to a Court of Law ; and Mr Saurin, late Attorney- 

 General in Ireland, gave an opinion to the same effect regarding 

 stake-nets, which was acted upon, and the engines demolished ; 

 but when the same thing, in one of the worst instances of the 

 kind, was done in Scotland, the party was immediately attacked 

 by all the satellites of the law, and fined, by a salmon-eating 

 jury (who expected that, under the stake-net system, they 

 would be saturated with salmon, and in whose eyes the LIVES 

 of the people were of much less value than their own gastric 

 functions), 100, with costs amounting to twice as much 

 more the honest and learned Judge never once telling them 

 that an engine which was in itself illegal could not, upon the 

 clearest principles of the law, be made the subject of a legal 

 action ; because, in Scotland, the clearest principles of the law 

 are utterly disregarded when it is intended that an individual 

 should be oppressed, a mere pretext being always sufficient.* 



* Nay, let me tell you, professionally, that the legality of the mode of fishing 

 practised by your friend Joshua is greatly doubted by our best lawyers ; and if 

 the stake-nets be actually an unlawful obstruction raised in the channel of the 



