28 
Trunk Drainage. 
engineers are employed to examine and report ; the public are 
instructed by full discussion of the subject; a majority of the 
interests concur, then perhaps tlie required amount of funds 
alarms them and the jn-oject drops to pieces. Again, renewed 
inundations peremptorily revive it ; application is made to Par- 
liament, and the Bill, having fought its way through Select Com- 
mittees of both Houses, constitutes Commissioners for adminis- 
tering its provisions, authorizes the raising of funds by taxes upon 
the lands, and tolls and contributions from the interests to be 
benefited ; settles disputes, compensates for injuries, and defines 
and authorizes the whole enterprise. Yet it appears, even from 
the fact of an Essay Prize being offered on this topic, that we 
are still in much the same dilemma with regard to Genei-al or 
Trunk Draina<2:e that our ancestors were in two centuries ago. 
Extensive drownings take place in many localities too frequently 
to be consistent with agricultural economy or the welfare of the 
community at large. Public determination is declaring for a 
remedy ; and yet tlie inactivity of those districts, or their ram- 
pant hostility to an alteration, debars the needed improvement. 
However, from our Fen experience, we know better than to allow 
the same series of misdii'ected efforts of Sewers, follies of Under- 
takers, and muddlings of petty Private-Drainages, to be acted 
over again in our upland valleys. As the Fen commons, navi- 
gations, fishings, decoys, turbaries, all yielded to the public 
drainage schemes, under more or less of compensation, so must 
■water-mills, canals, meadows, &c., give way to our approaching 
river improvements. And each of our principal river valleys — 
treated as a district complete in itself, and requiring nothing 
short of a comprehensive design, embracing its estuary delta, its 
marginal meadows, its navigation, its mills — all properties bound 
in one general plan — may muster perhaps sufficient forces to 
obtain for itself an Act of Parliament for efTectual ameliora- 
tion. 
Here, however, we must limit the usefulness of such a costly 
application of legislative authority, which, added to a minute 
engineering survey, and perhaps a heavy parliamentary contest, 
has doomed many a watery tract to hopeless retrogression in state 
and value. A cheaper, readier legal process is required for the 
innumerable cases o{ smaller streams, and for less extensive areas 
of country ; and for this purpose we have now the General Act, 
carried by Lord Lincoln in 1847. Land-Drainage Companies, 
in oi'der to aid private endeavours, can subsoil-drain, ditch, 
irrigate, warp, or inclose from the ocean, the land of one or any 
number of proprietors, and may obtain outfalls through inter- 
vening properties, provided they touch not any other interests : 
but until this Act (10 and 11 Vict., cap. 38) was passed into 
