The Bill repealed all previous Fishery Acts, and, as introduced by the Government, contained no recognition of a public right of fishing, because the English Acts contain none. To this O’Connell’s Committee demurred, and a clause was unanimously inserted overriding the English principle and admitting the existence of public right in Ireland. By decisive words solemnly agreed to, a vital difference was established in the fishery law of the two countries. Confronted by this fact, the Lord Chancellor of a Home Rule Ministry in 1908 overcame its force by laying down that “There was a misapprehension as to the law” in the minds of the law-makers who framed the enactment. Apparently, therefore, when the Imperial Parliament is persuaded to legislate for special Irish conditions, and declines to saddle Ireland with English usages, it “misapprehends the law.” CHAPTER XXIX. THE LORDS DIVIDED. In 1910 the fishermen appealed to the House of Lords. After a week’s debate that tribunal stood equally divided, and a second hearing was ordered. The arguments were renewed before seven peers, but the misdeeds of the Hamiltons, Chichesters, Clotworthys, and Donegalls were then unknown. Still their Patents so little impressed Lord Chancellor Loreburn, Lord Shaw, and Lord Robson that they refused to allow them to prevail against ancient user. In England and Scotland, neither Thames nor Tweed, Lake Windermere nor Loch Lomond, is an appanage of royalty. The frontagers who own the banks enjoy therewith the “bed and soil,” which is nowhere a “flower of the Crown.” To enforce a contrary rule in Ireland strong reasons should appear. Nevertheless, the Patents, in the light presented by the archivist, satisfied Lords Halsbury, Macnaghten, and Dunedin. They not unnaturally assumed that such grants would not have been issued without the King’s sanction, nor unless the Crown owned everything they gave away. How James I. acquired the fisheries they could not explain, and Lord Dunedin admitted this frankly:—“It is impossible to point to any forfeiture which identified the Lough. Yet it was obviously very probable that it was included in the various territories forfeited to the Crown in the time of the O’Neills.”