AND PROTECTION OF AGRICULTURAL LAND. 59 



of the landowners are until their operations have proceeded so 

 far as to render it impossible, if the interests of navigation require 

 it, to stop or to remove the works without considerable loss. A 

 difference of opinion has thus been raised, which has too often 

 ended in an expensive lawsuit. We have long held the opinion 

 that it would in many, if not in all, of our estuaries be most 

 desirable to have a line of conservation marked out by the 

 Admiralty (without whose authority no encroachment can be 

 made within high-water mark),* for the regulation of all works 

 for the protection of land. Were such a line defined, the land- 

 owners could then with confidence, and without risk of challenge, 

 enter on such works within the line of conservation as they con- 

 sidered necessary for the protection of their property, and a source 

 of much difference of opinion and expensive litigation would be 

 at once removed. It is obvious that were such a duty to be per- 

 formed, it must be committed to a duly qualified commission, so 

 composed that the protection of navigation and the interests of 

 landowners should be fully represented." 



Since that date a Eoyal Commission has determined the legal 

 boundary-line between sea and river salmon fishings in all the 

 estuaries of the kingdom. This was a delicate duty, affecting 

 the rights of many proprietors, and settling questions that had 

 long afforded ample discussion and many trials in the law 

 courts, but it has been done by the Salmon Fishery Commission. 

 I do not see why, in many cases at least, a similar commission 

 should not usefully be employed in deciding in what estuaries 

 reclamation is consistent with the interests of navigation, and if 

 so, to what extent it maybe carried. 



* This authority is now vested in the Board of Trade. 



