178 INCREASE OF LANCASHIRE TRADE. CHAP. X. 



CHAPTER X. 



THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER EAILWAY PROJECTED. 



'HE rapid growth of the trade and manufactures of 

 5outh Lancashire gave rise, about the year 1821, to 

 the project of a tramroad for the conveyance of goods 

 between Liverpool and Manchester. Since the con- 

 struction of the Bridgewater Canal by Brindley, some 

 fifty years before, the increase in the business transacted 

 between the two towns had become quite marvellous. 

 The steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, and the canal, 

 working together, had accumulated in one focus a vast- 

 aggregate of population, manufactures, and trade. 



The Duke's Canal, when first made, furnished a cheap 

 and ready means of conveyance between the seaport 

 and the manufacturing towns, for the raw cotton in 

 the one direction and the manufactured produce in the 

 other. During the first thirty years of its existence the 

 traffic was small and easily managed. About the end 

 of last century, for instance, it was considered satis- 

 factory if one cotton-flat a day reached. Manchester by 

 canal from Liverpool. But such was the expansion of 

 business caused by the inventions to which we have 

 referred that, before the lapse of many more years, the 

 navigation was found altogether inadequate to accom- 

 modate the traffic, which completely outgrew all the 

 Canal Companies' appliances of wharves, boats, and 

 horses. Cotton lay at Liverpool for weeks together, 

 waiting to be removed ; and it occupied a longer time 

 to transport the cargoes from Liverpool to Manchester 

 than it had done to bring them across the Atlantic 

 from the United States to England. Carts and wag- 



