370 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
to divert traffic to other canals instead of the railway, it is in accord- 
ance with ordinary business human nature that the railway should be 
unwilling to grant such facilities, and it is largely on this account 
that the principal schemes for canal improvement in this country 
hinge upon the Birmingham Canal Navigation. That, of course, is 
not the sole reason. The concentration of a mining and industrial 
population on the area served by that canal affords one of the impor- 
tant conditions favoring through traffic by water to the coast. In 
the paper already referred to M. Saner has propounded a scheme for 
connecting this area with the ports of Liverpool, Hull, London, and 
Bristol by canals capable of being navigated by lighters of 250 tons 
carrying capacity. But suppose, as Mr. Vernon-Harcourt suggested 
in his criticism of that scheme, a beginning were made with a project 
of more modest dimensions, “the actual enlargement of the most 
promising canal, such, for instance, as the Worcester and Birming- 
ham Canal,” let us consider, in the hight of what has been set forth, 
what would be the prospects of traffic on that improved waterway 
to the sea. The Birmingham area, it may be admitted, is more prom- 
ising for canal traffic than Berlin. It is rather to be compared with 
a portion of the area of the Ruhr ceal field. Still, the waterway thus 
provided would be no Rhine. It would not even be equal to the 
Dortmund-Ems Canal, the disappointing results of which we have 
already seen. When all the circumstances are considered, the prob- 
ability is, it seems to me, that nearly all the commodities enumerated 
above as making up the water traffic of the Black Country would still 
continue to form merely local traffic. Not improbably there would 
be some development in the carriage of iron manufactures to Bristol, 
a development hindered, as compared with the Dortmund-Ems route, 
by the inferiority of the waterway, but relatively favored through the 
superiority of the seaports with which Birmingham would be con- 
nected. In return there would not improbably be a certain trade in 
ores, how great it would be difficult to estimate, but so far as it went 
it would no doubt be a gain to the district. From the experience of 
Berlin and Germany generally, we may take it as settled that the 
improved waterway would do little to promote the trade in English 
agricultural produce. On the other hand, it would help to increase 
the competition of foreign and colonial produce of that kind with 
that of home production. Those, therefore, who advocate the spend- 
ing of public money on canals ought to consider whether this trade, 
among others, is one that it is desirable to promote by special boun- 
ties, such as an unremunerative state-built canal would constitute. 
