it was full of aquatic plants. The locks were very much decayed; and had generally on the one side a dyke of turf, constructed by the country people to facilitate their passage across the canal!" In 1836 this canal produced a net revenue of £13,236, or rather less than one per cent upon its cost. The other Irish canals are the Limerick Navigation, begun in 1767, and described as both costly and defective; the Barrow Navigation, joining the Barrow with the Grand Canal, and reported upon as so defective both in execution and design, as to consume in maintenance and repair the greater part of any revenue derived from it; the Boyne Navigation, "badly executed and very unprosperous;" the Newry Navigation, begun in 1739, executed at the public expense, and described also as 66 very defective;" and the Laggan Navigation, costly, very defective and unprofitable ! This picture is a truly lamentable one, and contrasts in a striking degree with the purposelike, and, in the main, prosperous condition of the English and Scotch canals. Quoting Arthur Young's saying that "a history of public works in Ireland would be a history of jobs," M'Culloch says, "The canals that have been constructed in that country seem completely to verify that caustic remark. Immense sums of money have been lavished upon them, to very little purpose except the enriching of contractors; and it is not easy to say whether the ignorance displayed by the greater number of the projectors, the waste of public money by which they have been for the most part characterised, or their inutility, be their most prominent feature." The reader of this description of the canals of Ireland will not fail to contrast it with the notice of the private enterprise in the way of travelling appliances described in a previous chapter. The genius and business energy of Bianconi enabled his little cars to outstrip in usefulness and profitableness these gigantic works. The canals scarcely succeeded even in providing profitable labour for the people, though the expenditure in the Bog of Allen, for example, might have saved the canal system of Ireland from the curious objection brought against it by the Duke of Richmond, who, in a letter on the Irish canals in the year 1808, thus discusses and disposes of an argument advanced in favour of canals as a means of giving employment to the people | of Ireland :"If the object be to prevent idleness and all its consequent evils, the same thing might be effected by filling them up again, or conveying the produce of Ireland from one place to another in wheelbarrows; the fact is, that cutting canals is not a regular, permanent, and profitable employment. One of the chief objections to canal-making is that it creates for a multitude of persons CHAPTER II. That lagging barks may make their lazy way, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, ii. 20. RESULTS OF CANAL ENTERPRISE-A CANAL JOURNEY-SPEED OF THE JOURNEY-AMENITIES OF CANAL TRAVELLING-CANAL SCENERYDANGERS OF CANAL TRAVELLING-EXISTING PASSENGER BARGES. BE RESULTS OF CANAL ENTERPRISE. EFORE proceeding to notice the later and greater canals-those ship canals that now form so prominent a feature in all our reading about ocean travelling and oversea commerce-it will be of interest to gather a few particulars of the nature and cost of the transit upon barge canals made for inland navigation, and of the pleasure or discomfort of a mode of travelling which is now completely a thing of the past. Here again it is very desirable to keep in mind that it is only as regards passenger travelling that our inland canals have ceased to be of importance. From the first, the use of the canal for transmitting merchandise was an object of greater importance to the projectors than the conveyance of passengers, and now, when the latter is at an end, and the mind of the general public is thus drawn away from the extensive trade still carried on by canal, one is apt to overlook the fact that a very considerable number of people are still engaged upon the canals, and that the social condition of the "barge population," as regards education, hygiene, and moral standing, is a problem anxiously studied by numerous public men, and which has frequently of late been brought under the notice of Parliament. The commercial results, then, of canals may very fitly occupy attention before speaking of these works from a passenger point of view. An immediate result of the opening of the Bridgewater Canal to Liverpool, for example, was a reduction in the cost of transmitting goods. The usual price before the opening of the canal had been 12s. a ton by water carriage—that is, by the slow and uncertain navigation of rivers, subject to all the changes of floods and droughts—and 40s. a ton by land carriage. Goods were conveyed by the new canal at a charge of 6s. a ton, with speed land carriage. and regularity exceeding that of advantage to travellers, yet in the conveyance of coal, and many other articles, it is of comparatively little consequence ;-cheapness as regards them is the grand presume, may be accomplished by a canal not less than by a railway." And they do not hesitate even to put one canal against another to prove their case, for while admitting that Brindley's canal from Manchester to Liverpool was circuitous and tedious, and consequently might be more successfully opposed by a railway, they proceed to argue in the following way :— From a book written in 1810 we learn that the freight of a ton of coal, of 36 bushels, was about twopence per mile, and so in pro- | desideratum,—an object which, we portion for other things; wheat from Norfolk which is a corn country, to Liverpool which is not, cost for carriage about 9s. 2d. the quarter of eight bushels, while by sea it would have cost 13s. 3d. or, without insurance, 11s. The toll, this writer adds, yielded to the stockholders generally seven or eight per cent, and they were restricted to a certain maximum of profits. The canal proprietors strove hard to maintain their ground against the railways on the ground of greater cheapness, but except in regard to bulky and weighty articles they eventually suffered. It may be interesting to reproduce some of the arguments by which it was sought to preserve for the canals the same advantages over the railway as they had undoubtedly enjoyed, for goods, and in some instances for passenger traffic, over the road conveyances. When a railway, or, to speak more correctly, two competing designs for railways, were projected between Edinburgh and Glasgow, the proprietors of the Union Canal, then eight years opened, argued against the project both in their annual and in special reports. In one part of the annual report of the company for 1830 it is said "The communication between Edinburgh and Glasgow by means of the canals does not labour under any such disadvantages. Though it is no longer than the communication by the common road or than it may be by a railway, yet the difference is by no means so great as between the Liverpool water conveyance and the Liverpool Railway. Neither does it require on an average 36 hours to convey goods by it: they leave Edinburgh in the evening, and are delivered in Glasgow next forenoon; so that, as they proceed during the night, comparatively little time is lost. Nor is the conveyance of goods liable to that uncertainty which is experienced between Liverpool and Manchester, for as no part of the passage is by water subject to wind and tide, the time may ordinarily be de"One of the principal advan-pended upon, unless in storms of tages of railways is celerity; but frost and snow,-a casualty to although this may be of special | which railways are much more en ested in the existing means of transit; and sixty years later, when the Union Canal was proposed to be brought into Edinburgh, the Mid-Lothian coal - owners deavoured to thwart a proposal which brought a dangerous rival into a market of which they had previously had the monopoly. A remnant of this state of antagonism, and of the efforts to introduce to public favour the new fuel which had so decidedly helped to reduce the price, was long preserved in the city of Edinburgh, where coalhawkers, with stentorian voices, were heard in every street of the Old Town calling "Canal Coal" for sale. Nominally, the calling of coal is prohibited in Edinburgh, but we believe it is only nominally prevented, and it is said that the word "coal" only now is called out, the canal being in fact practically driven out of the coal-trade by the railway, and the latter bringing coals with remarkable impartiality from any or every direction. liable than canals. To all this it | tained after serious opposition, may be added, that notwithstand-chiefly coming from persons intering the statements which are given of the cheapness of railways for the conveyance of passengers and goods, this has still to be proved; as yet it is even scarcely matter of experiment. If we take into account, not only the original expense of such undertakings, but the great expense on account of locomotive engines (a single locomotive engine of ten horse-power being estimated by Mr. Rastrick to cost not less than £367:4:4 per annum) the tear and wear of waggons, and of the railroad, etc., it appears natural to conclude that the cheapness will be in favour of canals, especially when celerity is not required. It is a well-known fact, that a good horse on a level railway can draw only about eight or ten tons, whereas on a canal a very indifferent horse can draw fifty tons in a clumsy, ill-constructed boat; but in a well-constructed iron boat it can draw sixty-five tons in addition to the boat. A horse thus draws from 5 to 6 times as much on a canal as on a railway; and if steam, or any other power, is substituted in both cases, the result will probably be in a similar proportion in favour of canals. The expense, too, of the tear and wear of waggons on a railway is far greater than of boats on a canal." All such speculations read curi-perty, whether in lands or houses. ously now in the light of half a century's experience of railways! The act for the Liverpool and Manchester Canal was only ob The canal system had other opposition to endure, much as the railway system subsequently had, from the dislike of proprietors to have their land interfered with. And to complete the parallel, it may be noticed that, in the end, the opening of the works was found to benefit the adjacent pro Two brief illustrations of this may suffice taken from Mr. Robert Reid's interesting personal reminiscences of last century : |