“Canals are to the inhabitants of a country what seas are to nations; they equally serve to assist the wants of society and benefit commerce.”—Cresy.

There is no movement of modern times that has been more pregnant in its results, or more interesting in its course of development, than that which has given to the world its existing system or systems of transportation. Of that movement, the competition of the railway and the canal for the traffic that has been equally open to both has been a phase that has received less attention than it deserved. The railways have now had a long innings. They have been productive of immense advantage to the world. The transportation of both goods and passengers has enormously increased as a result of the facilities they have afforded. But whether railways or canals are the best adapted to economical transport is still a problem which is exercising the minds of traders, economists, politicians, and engineers, in most of the leading countries of the world.

It is probably among the things not generally remembered, if it is among the things generally known, that railways were first projected and sanctioned as feeders to canals. They were designed as the humble handmaidens of the canal system. The preamble to the earliest railway Acts recites that they would be of “great advantage to the extensive manufactories of earthenware” established in the Potteries and elsewhere. In 1792, the Monmouthshire Canal Navigation Company were authorised “to make railways or stone roads,”[217] from their canals to various ironworks and mines in the counties of Monmouth and Brecknock.[218] In the following year, the Grand Junction Company were authorised to make a railway at Blisworth, and “a collateral communication by cuts, railways, or other ways and means,” with their canal at Gayton, and the navigation of the river Nene at Northampton.[219] Up to 1825, indeed, canals were the absolute masters of the situation. Their owners could afford to smile at the idea of competition from railroads, and they did in many cases actually do so.

In the construction of canals, as in the promotion of railway projects, there have, in most European countries, been periods of speculative operations on a large scale, culminating in crises more or less acute. In England, the canal mania was at its height between 1791 and 1794. In those four years eighty-one canal and navigation Acts were passed by Parliament.[220] This was only seven years before the first railway Act was obtained for the construction of the Wandsworth and Croydon Railway.

In Holland and Russia, this epoch had been reached many years before. In Holland many canals had been constructed early in the seventeenth century, and in Russia, the same movement, initiated and carried to a certain degree of development by Peter the Great, culminated in a great number of canal projects being put forward about the same time that the canal mania was raging in England[221] over the question whether a railway or a canal should be built for the purpose of carrying coals from the inland collieries to the sea at Stockton. In 1768, a survey had been made for a canal for the purpose by one George Dixon and one Robert Whitworth. In the following year, Brindley surveyed the same route and reported that a canal about 27 miles in length could be constructed for 63,722l. No action, however, was taken upon either survey, nor upon a subsequent report by Rennie on the same scheme. In 1818, we find the project still exciting the attention of Darlington and Stockton, and the inhabitants of the district divided as to the merits of the two systems. In the latter part of that year, a meeting held at Darlington pronounced a judgment which closed the controversy. It was decided that a “rail or tramway was, under existing circumstances, preferable to a canal.” The expectations of the friends of railway transport were not, however, very high. They were advised by a committee which had been appointed to consider the subject, that “one horse, of moderate power, could easily draw downwards on the railway about ten tons, and upwards about four tons, exclusive of empty waggons.” Small as this outlook was, it was a great advance on the then existing system of coal transport, the towns of Tees-side having been, up to that date, supplied with fuel by droves of asses and mules, which stood in the principal thoroughfares until their burdens had been disposed of—

Even then, however, the railway had not made much impression, and the canal interest had as yet little to fear. The promoters of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, as we have seen, had no idea of employing locomotives, or of providing for passenger traffic. No mention of either was made in their original bill. The railway was intended only “to facilitate the conveyance of coal, iron, lime, corn, and other commodities” from the interior. “It had no congener for years. The impression of most people, while it was under construction, was that it was more or less of a mistake. While the line was in progress, a vigorous agitation for the construction of a canal for similar purposes was going on in the adjoining county of Northumberland.” When the locomotive engine was introduced upon the scene, the friends of canal navigation hailed it with ridicule. “Who,” it was said, “would ever dream of paying to be conveyed in something like a coal-wagon, upon a dreary wagon-way, by a roaring steam-engine?” The question appeared to carry its answer written on its face. The Quarterly Review, of March 1825, ridiculed the idea of the people of England trusting themselves to the mercy of “such a machine” as a locomotive engine on the then proposed London and Woolwich Railway, and declared its readiness “to back old Father Thames against the Woolwich Railway for any sum.” Nicholas Wood, the author of the first really scientific treatise on railway locomotion, denounced the idea that locomotives could be worked at the rate of 12 miles an hour.[222] So recently as 1830, when the Manchester and Liverpool Railway was opened, the railway system was intended for the transport of merchandise alone, and a speed of more than 12 miles an hour was not dreamt of. In this case, as in that of the Stockton and Darlington Railway five years before, the transportation problem was still unsolved.

But at coal-waggons, or rather at heavy traffic generally, the enterprise was expected to stop.

The Rainhill locomotive contest, and the convincing proofs afforded thereby of the practicability of applying railway transport alike to goods and passengers, at a high rate of speed, impressed men’s minds with the conviction that, if canals were not already doomed, they were, at any rate, by no means so superior as they had seemed up to that time. The Stockton and Darlington Railway had been opened for the purpose of bringing the coalfields and the ports of Durham together. There was no idea of competing with any other means of transport, because no other means of transport existed, except the pack-horse. But in the case of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the object in view was that of antagonism to the canals, which had proved impracticable in their dealings with the merchants and manufacturers of those towns. If the canal companies had met the just and reasonable demands of the traders of Lancashire, the probability is that the Liverpool and Manchester Railway would not have been constructed until many years later. As it was, the high-handed proceedings adopted by those companies, raised the Frankenstein of railway competition, and the difficulty now was, how to lay it. Sisyphus, himself, had no harder task to perform. The issue for a time appeared to be doubtful, but not for long. The new system of transport fulfilled every expectation formed by its most sanguine promoters, and disappointed every apprehension entertained by its enemies. The canal companies found it necessary to undertake experiments, in order to demonstrate the greater economy of their system of transport. They also attempted to introduce steam propulsion, to improve their lines of communication, and in some cases to reduce their rates of charge. They did not, however, greatly mend matters. Nicholas Wood analysed their experiments, and declared that “coals and minerals were conveyed on railways equally cheap, if not at a less rate, than on canals,” and in opposition to those who maintained the greater economy of waterways, he declared that “in no instance has it been shown that canal navigation is conducted at a cheaper rate, including every charge.”[223] He thereupon argued that “the slow, tardy, and interrupted transit of canal navigation must, therefore, of necessity yield to other modes, affording a more rapid and certain means of conveyance.”[224]

In 1825, Charles Maclaren of Edinburgh wrote an elaborate pamphlet on the comparative merits of railways, canals, and common turnpike roads, in which he maintained that the effect obtained by the draught of a single horse was ten times as great on a railway, and thirty times as great on a canal, as on a well-made road. He argued, further, that a canal cost about three times as much as a railway, so that it would require “nearly the same rates or dues per ton to make the capital yield the same interest.” The relative conditions of working canals and railways were at that time very imperfectly understood, and probably the author of this interesting pamphlet would have been amazed, had he lived, to see the average expenditure per mile of railway constructed in England and Wales returned, as it now is, at close on 50,000l. per mile, or fully four times the outlay incurred on our canal system, relatively to mileage.

An engineer of great experience, speaking of the contest between railways and canals, has observed[225] that the introduction of railways proved, in the first instance, a practical bar to the extension of the canal system, and, eventually, a too successful competition with the canals already made was the result. Frequently the route that had been selected by the canal engineer was found (as was to be expected) a favourable one for the competing railway, and in the result, the towns that had been served by the canal, were served by the railway, which was thus in a position to take away, even the local traffic of the canal. For some time it appeared as though canal undertakings and canalised river navigations must fail, for although heavy goods could be carried very cheaply on canals, and although, in the case of the many works and factories erected on their banks, or on basins connected with them, there was with canal navigation no item of expense corresponding to the cost of cartage to the railway stations, yet the smallness of the railway rates for heavy goods, and the greater speed of transit, were found to be more than countervailing advantages.

Canal companies, therefore, set themselves to work to add to their position of mere owners of water highways, entitled to take toll for the use of those highways, the function of common carriers, thus putting themselves on a par with the railway companies, who were, in the outset, legalised only as mere owners of iron highways, and as the receivers of toll from any persons who might choose to run engines and trains thereon—a condition of things which was altered as soon as it was pointed out that it was utterly incompatible either with punctuality or with safe working. This addition to the legal powers of the canal companies, made by the Acts of 1845 and 1847, had a very beneficial effect upon the value of their property, and assisted somewhat to preserve a mode of transport competing with that afforded by the railways.

In most of the leading countries of the world, a time arrived when the canal system and the railway system came into strong competition, and when it seemed doubtful on which side the victory would lie. This contest was necessarily more marked in England than in any other country. England had not, indeed, been the first in the field with canals, as she had been with railways. On the contrary, we are told by Smiles that “at a time when Holland had completed its magnificent system of water communication, and when France, Germany, and even Russia, had opened up important lines of inland communication, England had not cut a single canal.”[226] But England, having once started on a career of canal development, followed it up with greater energy and on a more comprehensive scale than any other country. For more than half a century canals had had it all their own way. They had in their time done good work, in spite of much opposition.[227] Coming as they did on the back of an era of very dear transport, they easily proved their claims to make transport cheaper. Baines states that they carried traffic for about one-fourth of the rate that was paid previous to the introduction of such waterways.[228] They were upheld and protected by large vested interests. They offered the facilities which were desired by many inland towns of being brought into direct connection with the sea. But the railway system, first put forward as a tentative experiment, and without the slightest knowledge on the part of its promoters of the results that were before long to be realised, was making encroachments, and proving its capabilities. This was a slow process, as the way had to be felt. The first railway Acts did not contemplate the use of locomotives, nor the transport of passenger traffic. The Stockton and Darlington Railway, constructed in 1825, was the first on which locomotives were employed. Even at this date, there were many who doubted the expediency of having a railroad instead of a canal, and in the county of Durham, as we have already indicated, there was a fierce fight, carried on for more than twenty years.[229]

In the United States, the supremacy of waterways was maintained until a much later date. As we have elsewhere shown, a keen and embittered struggle was kept up between the canal and the railroad companies until 1857; and even in the latter year the Legislature of the State of New York, finding that railway competition was making serious inroads upon their canal traffic, were considering whether they should not either entirely prohibit the railways from carrying freight, or impose such tolls upon railway tonnage as would cripple the companies in their competition with canals.[230] Finding also that a large part of the traffic that had been diverted from the canals to the railroads had been carried by the latter “without profit, if not at an absolute loss,” the Legislature was recommended to enact that the railway companies should be “compelled to transport at no less than fairly remunerative rates such freight as would naturally seek the cheapest mode of transit.” The canals were said to have been “despoiled of their income by a semblance of legal enactment, and their rightful heritage bestowed upon chartered competitors.”[231] We may smile in this year of grace at such interpretations of the fundamental laws of political economy and of the liberty of the subject. No doubt John Stuart Mill would have set the rights of meum and tuum in a clearer and more logical light. But in those days vested interests fought hard, and distinctions were not so clearly drawn as in these. The element of speed, to which such great importance has since been attached, was only then beginning to be appreciated.[232] The vested interest of canals had the Government on its side, the canals having been largely constructed with State aid. The railways, on the contrary, were entirely the products of private initiative, which had to make a bold fight in order to establish any footing at all. The two systems were, moreover, essentially antagonistic in their characteristics. “The infernal activity of railroad men was naturally most repulsive to gentlemen of the old school, whose stately decorum was well reflected in the placid and unostentatious movement of the boats on the canals.”[233] The railway companies were accused of having entered into a conspiracy “deliberately to break down these great public works, upon which the State has spent forty years of labour,” and to “crush the canals into a kind of atrophy, which might result in making them odious to the State, and to transfer them eventually at a vile price to the managers of this highly creditable scheme.” The public press took up the cudgels on behalf of the canals. A mighty wave of popular indignation against the railroads swept over the land. “Danger to the canals!” was the shibboleth of political parties and commercial cliques. The leading New York journal declared that “the whole community is aroused as it never was before.” Prominent men of all parties demanded, through the press, that the canals should be rescued from the danger with which they were threatened. The agitation, however, came to nothing. It had no solid bottom. It was an agitation similar in kind to that which had disturbed Europe when Arkwright’s spinning machine and Compton’s mule were taking the place of hand labour. The clamour suddenly collapsed, and was never heard of afterwards.

Meanwhile the railway system proceeded apace. The records of human progress contain no more remarkable chapter than that which tells of the growth of American railroads. The State of New York, in which the canal interest was the strongest, had, in 1845, 721 miles of railway. In 1877 it had about 6000 miles. In the United States, as a whole, the railway mileage increased from 4633 miles in 1845 to 78,000 miles in 1877, and 160,000 miles in 1889. The growth of the system was attended, as it always is, by a corresponding growth of trade, and what was of more importance to the people, by a diminution of the cost of living. The total freight traffic carried on the railways of the United States in 1881 was 350 million tons, being an average of 6·7 tons per head. In 1888 the total freight carried was 589½ million tons, being an average of 9·8 tons per head. In 1870 the cost of conveying a barrel of flour from Chicago to New York was 6s. 5d.; in 1880 a working man was only called on to pay 3s. 3½d. for the same service.

From the date when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was fairly established, canal navigation in England, with a few notable exceptions, appears to have fallen into a slumber which recalls the long night of depression and inactivity that settled down upon the arts and sciences during the middle ages. After a few years, hardly a single apologist could be found for the system of internal navigations. Railways were all the vogue, and were built everywhere. The covering of the country with a network of iron roads was made the business alike of engineers, economists, financiers, and manufacturers. The results of the railway mania of 1845-46, did something to stem the torrent of new projects, many of them of an almost impossible character. But only for a time. The canal system never again appeared to look up. One by one, canals dropped out of the race, and were bought up by railway companies, either with a view to getting rid of their competition, and so securing absolute control over the traffic, or in order to make way for new railway lines. The canals that thus fell into the hands of railways were, perhaps naturally enough, not particularly well looked after. But for this the public did not seem to care. The country had for many years been enjoying an exceptional amount of prosperity. The start that our mechanical and manufacturing superiority had given us in the race of nations, aided and abetted by the locomotive engine and the steamship, and the awakening of foreign countries to a sense of requirements previously ungratified, if not unfelt, created an enormous demand for our industrial products. In many industries, indeed, we had hardly any competition. In most others, there was a sufficient margin of profit to make it of little consequence what rates were charged for railway transport, so long as the transport was effected. In such a race as this, the slow movements of canal boats were not deemed worthy of attention, and the railways had it all their own way.

But a time was now at hand when all this was about to be changed. Foreign nations had learned our arts and manufactures, had adopted our processes, had purchased our machinery, and had instituted systems of technical instruction that caused industrial knowledge to be generally diffused and thoroughly appreciated. The development of the modern steamship, acting in concert with the improvement of railway transport in the United States, inflicted upon British agriculture a blow from which it has not rallied, and possibly never may. The prices of agricultural produce in England, hitherto almost unaffected by the range of prices elsewhere, were now controlled by the cost of producing wheat in Dakota, mutton in New Zealand, beef in Texas, butter and cheese in France, and other commodities elsewhere. Almost suddenly, a very remarkable fall took place in the profits of agriculturists at home. Our agricultural population, with its purchasing power thus seriously crippled, did not bring orders into the manufacturing districts to the same extent as formerly. Coincidently with this falling off in the home demand, foreign nations, having learned to supply their own wants, sought fewer English-made goods than before. A little later still, and they were competing “brow to brow” with English industrials in neutral markets. Our import and export returns, which had been advancing with portentous strides, suddenly dropped down in a way that caused serious alarm. It was found that the decline was one of price rather than of volume, and manufacturers, having to accept much less profits than formerly, were compelled to strain every nerve to make ends meet. This could only be done in one or other of three different ways—by the command of cheaper materials, by more economical processes of manufacture, or by cheaper transport. The railways of the United States, the telegraph system, and our own steamship lines provided the first desideratum. The second were diligently looked after by the manufacturers themselves. As regards the third they were powerless. Inquiry revealed the fact that the railway rates charged in England were generally higher than those charged in competing countries. In some cases they had damaged once-flourishing industries, and imperilled the very existence of large centres of population. Complaints against railway monopoly and railway exactions became universal. The railways were for a long time inexorable, and as they turned a deaf ear to the remonstrances of traders, the latter had to seek elsewhere for relief.

At this stage in the remarkable annals of recent industrial progress, attention was once again turned to the comparative merits of canals and railways for the transport of heavy traffic. A committee of the House of Commons was in 1882 appointed to inquire into the subject of British canals. This committee sat for a considerable time and took a great deal of evidence, most of it of an extremely unsatisfactory character, as showing how greatly British canals had passed under the domination of the principal railway companies. The report of this committee directed renewed attention to the advantages of canals as a means of transport, and gave an impetus to canal construction, of which the Manchester Ship Canal, now approaching completion, is the latest and most signal triumph. New ship canals are, however, being talked of; and it is more than likely that Sheffield and some other inland towns will, before long, be able to float large vessels to the sea.

The Railway and Canal Traffic Act of 1888 contained certain provisions that specially affected canals. One of these requires returns to be made annually to Parliament by canal companies. This provision will enable us to ascertain that which has heretofore been a sealed book—the extent to which British canals are now utilised. The concurrent proposals of the railway companies as to maximum rates and terminal charges will be likely to help the canal system, if it has any vitality left, towards resuscitation.