Decline of Canals 307 



same rates, to carry by water heavy traffic, in the delivery 

 of which time was not of so much importance. But the canals 

 as they came into their possession were naturally unadapted 

 for such traffic without being more or less remodelled, and this 

 the railway companies have not attempted. 



" When we consider the enormous disadvantages under 

 which the majority of the canals of this country now labour, 

 the great matter for wonder is, not that they do not secure the 

 lion's share of the traffic, but that they get any traffic at all." 



If, for the sake of argument, we leave out of account all the 

 " enormous disadvantages " here alluded to, and assume that 

 the physical difficulties already detailed could be overcome 

 without much trouble or great expense (though this would, 

 indeed, be a prodigious assumption), we should still have the 

 fact that the number of traders in the country who could hope 

 to benefit from any possible system of internal navigation 

 would necessarily be limited to those in certain districts, 

 whereas the railway can be taken anywhere, and be made to 

 serve the interests of each and every district or community 

 in the country. 



It is true that when commodities can be sent direct from an 

 ocean-going vessel to a works situated immediately alongside 

 a canal, the waterway may have the advantage over the rail- 

 way ; and the same may be the case as regards manufactured 

 goods forwarded in the opposite direction. Of the 235,000 

 tons of flints, clay and other potters' materials brought into the 

 Potteries district of North Staffordshire during 1910, no fewer 

 than 200,000 tons, imported at Runcorn, Ellesmere Port 

 or Weston Port, were taken by canal to pottery works located 

 on or near to the canal banks. In these circumstances the 

 North Staffordshire Railway Company, who also control 

 the Trent and Mersey Navigation, cannot, as railway owners, 

 compete with themselves as canal owners. In the case of the 

 Aire and Calder, the physical conditions of which are ex- 

 ceptionally favourable, coal can readily be sent from the 

 collieries immediately alongside the waterway to the steamers 

 or the coal ships in the port of Goole. On the Birmingham 

 Canal, also, the traffic between collieries and works, or between 

 works and railway transhipping basins, on the same level, 

 is already so considerable^that no great increase could be 

 accommodated without carrying out on the canal a widening 



