It must be explained that the Marbury Pipe Line had been laid in 1882 by the Mersey Salt & Brine Company, who carried it, by agreement, across lands belonging to private landowners and over a canal belonging to the North Stafford Railway. The railway made a formal protest, but an amicable settlement was ultimately reached by which the Mersey Salt Company agreed to pay the North Stafford Company £5 a year and to remove the pipe on receipt of a three months’ notice. The railway company appear to have persisted with their opposition in order to force an admission from the Mersey Company that they possessed no permanent right to carry the pipe across their canal, but the concern was of such trifling importance that it was practically ignored by the people of the district, and for twenty years after the property of the Mersey Salt Company and the Marbury Brine Pipe had been acquired by the Salt Union, the question of the removal of brine from the neighbourhood in which it was raised had found all classes of the salt community united against such proposals. But with the completion of the works at Weston Point, and the enlargement of the Marbury Pipe and the installation of powerful engines, capable of driving millions of gallons of brine from Marbury to be converted into salt at the sea-board, a new menace was organized against which the Urban Authorities and Local Councils made a long and spirited, if fruitless, resistance. In the autumn of 1910, the North Stafford Railway served the Salt Union with a notice to remove their pipe line from the Trent and Mersey Canal by the end of the following March, and the Salt Union proving obdurate, the towns of Northwich, Winsford, and Middlewich promoted the Brine Pumping (Cheshire) Bill, “to regulate the conveyance of brine pumped, raised and gotten” in the county. The original draft, which proposed to permit the removal of brine by pipe to a distance of three miles within the county from the place at which it was raised, was amended to permit manufacturers to carry brine by pipe from one set of works to another in their own occupation, and they further attempted to meet the alleged rights of the Salt Union by the insertion of a clause allowing the Marbury Pipe to be used for the conveyance of brine to the extent of 250 million gallons a year. But the Salt Union declined all conciliatory overtures, and combated the Bill before the Select Committee on the grounds that it was a proposal to alter the common law of England and interfere with the sacred rights of property. The injury that was sought to be done, not only to the Salt Union but to the export trade of the country, was enlarged upon, and the Committee may have been impressed by the assurance that the Union, so far from intending to leave Winsford and Northwich, expected to do an even greater trade in those districts in the future than had been done there in the past. In the result, the Salt Union’s insistence upon the