The Commissioner of Salmon Fisheries, Mr. Eden, has been convening meetings of gentlemen interested in Salmon rivers at Chester, Conway, York, and various other places, to explain the provisions of the bill which Government introduced at the end of last session and intend to bring forward again.  I have not attended any of these meetings, but expect he will be at Whalley or Preston shortly, when we shall hear what he has got to say.  The new bill, as printed last year, does not embody any of the suggestions of the Worcester meeting; but as I learn from private sources, Mr. Eden, at the various meetings he has lately attended, has thrown out various suggestions, some of which are highly objectionable.

For instance, he suggests that the magistrates in quarter sessions assembled shall have the power to appoint conservators, and that the conservators shall have the power to expend all the money raised by subscription in having water-bailiffs to put up fish-ladders, commencing actions at law in certain cases; and if the subscriptions are not adequate to defray all these expenses, that they (the conservators) shall have the power to levy a rate in aid on the riparian proprietors.

I cannot see how this can be made to work equitably.  If the rate be laid on the extent of frontage to the river, one man may have a great extent of no value for fishing purposes, another may have only one pool, so conveniently formed and placed for netting that he will be able to catch ten times as many fish as the other.  Then how are the fisheries in the estuary and just above tideway to be valued?  They probably take ninety per cent. of all the seasonable fish.  Will they be willing to pay ninety per cent. of the rate?

Again, the college at Stonyhurst claims a right of several fishery, both in the Ribble and the Hodder.  That is, they exercise a right to fish in both rivers, where they have no land, and they exercise this right so freely that they take more fish than all the other upper proprietors added together.  If, then, the tax is laid on the extent of frontage to the rivers, these reverend gentlemen would escape entirely, so far as the right of several fishery extends, and would only pay the rate on their own extent of frontage.

Again, the new bill does not embody the suggestions of the Worcester meeting as to the right of way for the water-bailiffs; but according to Mr. Eden’s comment upon it at Chester and elsewhere, a strict surveillance is to be kept on weirs, to which the water-bailiffs are to have free access.  Personally I have no objection to this, provided the water-bailiffs are allowed free access to the banks of the river elsewhere; but I have a strong objection to be made the subject of offensive exceptional legislation.  Are not gamekeepers as likely to need looking after as mill-owners?

Again, the bill does not touch on minimum penalties.  This it ought to do, for in some districts (Wales, for instance) there is a strong animus against all attempts at preserving the Salmon, and notorious poachers, duly convicted of offences against the act of 1861, in some instances have been fined a shilling, in others a farthing.