BRITISH CANALS

AQUEDUCT AT PONTCYSYLLTE (IN THE DISTANCE).

(Constructed by Telford to carry Ellesmere Canal over River Dee. Opened 1803. Cost £47,000. Length, 1007 feet.)

[Frontispiece.

[vii]

PREFACE

The appointment of a Royal Commission on Canalsand Waterways, which first sat to take evidence onMarch 21, 1906, is an event that should lead to anexhaustive and most useful enquiry into a questionwhich has been much discussed of late years, but onwhich, as I hope to show, considerable misapprehensionin regard to actual facts and conditions has hithertoexisted.

Theoretically, there is much to be said in favour ofcanal restoration, and the advocates thereof have notbeen backward in the vigorous and frequent ventilationof their ideas. Practically, there are other all-importantconsiderations which ought not to be overlooked,though as to these the British Public have hithertoheard very little. As a matter of detail, also, it isdesirable to see whether the theory that the declineof our canals is due to their having been "captured"and "strangled" by the railway companies—a theorywhich many people seem to believe in as implicitly asthey do, say, in the Multiplication Table—is reallycapable of proof, or whether that decline is not, rather,to be attributed to wholly different causes.

In view of the increased public interest in thegeneral question, it has been suggested to me that[viii]the Appendix on "The British Canal Problem" inmy book on "Railways and their Rates," published inthe Spring of 1905, should now be issued separately;but I have thought it better to deal with the subjectafresh, and at somewhat greater length, in the presentwork. This I now offer to the world in the hope that,even if the conclusions at which I have arrived are notaccepted, due weight will nevertheless be given to theimportant—if not (as I trust I may add) the interesting—seriesof facts, concerning the past and presentof canals alike at home, on the Continent, and inthe United States, which should still represent, Ithink, a not unacceptable contribution to the presentcontroversy.

EDWIN A. PRATT.

London, April 1906.

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CONTENTS