166 A PROLONGED DISPUTE. 



ing, and so far succeeded in their agitation that, by an 

 Act of Parliament passed in 1851, it was declared illegal. 

 The Act was constantly evaded, however, until about 

 1861, when fresh measures were put in force for the sup- 

 pression of the obnoxious system. The drifters gained 

 their end by loudly declaring that seineing scared away 

 the shoals, that immature fish were caught, that the 

 spawning-beds were injured, and that the fish caught 

 were unfit to be cured. The trawlers, on the other hand, 

 asserted that their mode of fishing was at once the least 

 injurious and the most productive, and that it was admir- 

 ably adapted for a Highland loch or an arm of the sea. 

 The disputes between the two factions continued so loud 

 that Government appointed a Commission of Inquiry, who 

 reported in favour of trawling; and the Acts of 1851 and 

 1861 were accordingly repealed in 1867. But the drifters 

 have once more opened up the question ; another Commis- 

 sion of Inquiry has been appointed ; and what may be the 

 issue is at present uncertain. 



No one, however, who has seen both trawling and drift- 

 ing, can doubt that the former is the quieter as it is the 

 more economical mode of fishing ; and we agree with a 

 recent writer in The Times, that the casting into the 

 waters every night, at a fishing-station like Wick or 

 Fraserburgh, of a thousand miles of drift-nets, is quite 

 enough to alarm the largest shoal of herrings which ever 

 tempted man's cupidity. The contrast, as he says, be- 

 tween the capture of a shoal of pilchards at St. Ives and 

 of a few thousand barrels of herring at Wick^ or Fraser- 

 burgh, is very striking. We shall describe hereafter the 

 Cornish seineing ; the ease and quiet with which the 

 captured pilchards are carried ashore at the leisure of the 



