SCOTLAND.
A lawsuit for some years pending in the Court of Session in reference to the use of the piers at Gareloch by passengers landing from steamers plying on the Clyde on Sundays has just been brought to a termination. When the Sunday steamer was first started on the Clyde, in 1853, Sir James Col- quhoun, proprietor of the piers of Gareloehhead, Row, and Rowmore, took forcible measures to prevent the landing of the passengers there, and for several Sundays the piers were the scene of unseemly contests between the passengers attempting to land and the servants of the proprietor resisting the attempt. Legal measures were then taken on the one side to interdict, and on the other to claim, the use of the pier by the public on Sundays. The court in the first instance refused to interdict the public use of the pier on Sundays until the proprietor had established his rights in a possessory action to exclude the public. In the action as ultimately brought it was ad- mitted by the defenders, Paton and others owners of the steamer Emperor, that the three piers in question had all been built by Sir James Colquhoun at his own expense, and the question at issue was whether the piers being used by the public on the six days of the week the public were entitled also to use them on the seventh. The court held that in the circumstances in which these piers had been erected the proprietor was entitled, in virtue of possession and of usage previous to 1853, to restrict the public use of the piers in the way he sought to do, and that the proprietor did not necessarily sacrifice his private rights by giving the public access to the piers their being no grant of free-port in the case. The court therefore interdicted the defenders from landing passengers at the piers in question in vessels leaving and returning to Glasgow on Sundays.
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