J. Stephen Jeans

“ The river Thames is in many respects one of the most remarkable in the world. No other river has so large a commerce, no other river can boast such a display of shipping, no other river is the highway for such a large population, no other river has such a romantic and interesting history. The Thames is, however, eclipsed by many other waterways as regards natural advantages for maritime commerce. It has an extremely tortuous, irregular, and dangerous channel; it is subject to great fluctuations of tides; it is liable to be silted up with the deposits of sand and sewage from its lower reaches ”

“ We are only concerned to state the simple truth. It may be that the railway companies in this country cannot afford to carry goods at cheaper rates. That is their look-out. They have undoubtedly incurred vast expense in providing the most ample and the most admirable facilities of transport, short of the all-important item of its cost. In no other country do we find such a splendid service. No other country has better roads nor more capable administration, nor quicker and more reliable dispatch, nor greater conveniences for traffic of all kinds. ”

“ He is as plain a looking man as one of the boors of the Peake, or one of his own carters, but when he speaks all ears listen, and every mind is filled with wonder at the things he pronounces to be practicable. He has cut a mile through bogs, which he binds up, embanking them with stones which he gets out of other parts of the navigation, besides about a quarter of a mile into the hill Yelden; on the side of which he has a pump, which is worked by water, and a stove, the fire of which sucks through a pipe the damps that would annoy the men who are cutting towards the centre of the hill. ”

“ There is a very prevalent impression that railways and canals have each their proper and natural function in the transport of merchandise—the railways in the carrying of goods of considerable intrinsic value, or of a perishable character, in which speed is an element of value; and the canals in conveying heavy merchandise, such as coal, iron ore, pig iron, building stone, timber, and other traffic, of relatively low intrinsic value, and incapable of being deteriorated by delay. ”

“ In no country have both systems of transportation had a more eventful, instructive, and interesting history. In no country have railroads and canals been afforded equally free scope for development, and in no country have transportation rates been cut so fine and reduced so low. We may, therefore, by a consideration of the conditions of transport in the United States, and especially by seeking to ascertain how far the two great systems of internal communication have competed with each other, learn something that will throw a good deal of light on this problem. ”

“ A glance at a map of the United States will suffice to show that it has unique natural facilities for water transport. Its great lakes, which are inland seas of no inconsiderable dimensions, now connected together by the Erie and St. Mary’s Falls Canals, its magnificent rivers, such as the Mississippi and the Missouri, and the natural configuration of the country, create an ensemble for cheap transportation such as no other country can surpass. Besides these resources, however, the United States have now a railway system of over 160,000 miles. ”

“ If there is one country more than another that ought to be possessed of ample and complete water communication, that country is surely Ireland. Surrounded on all sides by the sea, with a population greatly inured to the conditions of living upon or by the water, it should have at once the cheapest and the most comprehensive system of water transport in the world. ”

“ It must be borne in mind, for example, that as railways are performing the double function of transporting both passengers and goods, their traffic per mile, measured in terms of merchandise, cannot be fairly compared with that of canals, which carry goods traffic alone. Nor can the traffic of a canal, where the speed is necessarily slow, be rightly compared with that of a river like the Thames or the Rhine, where there is almost no limit to the speed that may be safely applied, except the limits imposed by mechanical laws. ”

“ In the British Colonies, and especially in India and Canada, both the railways and the waterways have been and are being provided at the public expense, and are administered by officials responsible to the people generally. England, on the contrary, has allowed both railways and waterways to be monopolised by private enterprise, with results disastrous to the latter, as we have already seen, and with consequences, as regards the former, that threaten to be almost as serious to the public, who are held fast in the iron grip of a monopoly which they are powerless to control. ”

“ There is no characteristic of the ancient Roman Empire that is more striking at the present day, after the lapse of nearly twenty centuries, than the proficiency that the people had attained in the arts and sciences, and more especially in the arts of architecture and engineering. The aqueducts which they built for the supply of water for domestic purposes were vast structures that have hardly been equalled in any subsequent period, and the canals which they constructed for the drainage of morasses, or the transport of armies, were hardly less remarkable. ”

“ COMPARATIVE COST OF WATER AND LAND TRANSPORT.
There is no matter connected with the trade and commerce of a country that is of greater importance to its welfare than cheap transport. The business of transportation, both by land and by sea, is now one of the most gigantic in the history of the world. ”

“ THE WATERWAYS OF FRANCE.
Within recent years, the advocates of water transport in Great Britain and other countries, have been accustomed to point to France as a notable example of the advantages of improving and extending the internal navigations of a country. It is true that no nation has done more with this end in view. From first to last, France has expended a larger sum on canal navigation than any other nation. ”

“ It is now too late to attempt to remedy the evil. Nothing but the conviction on the part of the railway companies that they are financially wrong in forcing the slow heavy traffic on to the metals, will render possible the rehabilitation of the canal system, however fully all other persons may be convinced of the national importance of our internal navigation.”
Among the many current questions relative to transport, none is more urgent than that of how far the waterways of a country can be profitably and conveniently utilised in competition with railways. ”

“ An examination of the geography of European countries will disclose the fact that the United Kingdom is almost unique in regard to its possession of a magnificent coast-line, studded with harbours and docks, and approached by a large number of navigable rivers, which afford easy communication with the sea. If we compare our facilities with those of Germany, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Italy, or indeed any other European country, we cannot fail to be struck with their enormous superiority. Scarcely any part of the United Kingdom is more than a hundred miles distant from a good harbour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great secret of cheap transportation is to handle and carry large quantities. It is this, and this only, that has enabled the United States to achieve such remarkably cheap transport, both on railways and canals—on land and on water. In 1850 the capacity of the trains which carried grain from Chicago to New York was only twenty-five cars or waggons, carrying eight tons each, or a total train-load of about 200 tons. It is now, however, no uncommon thing to see train loads of 1000 to 1200 tons between Buffalo and New York. ”

“ The Chirk Aqueduct carries the canal across the valley of the Ceriog, between Chirk Castle and the village of that name. At this point the valley is above 700 feet wide; the banks are steep, with a flat alluvial meadow between them, through which the river flows. The country is finely wooded. Chirk Castle stands on an eminence on its western side, with the Welsh mountains and Glen Ceriog as a background; the whole composing a landscape of great beauty, in the centre of which Telford’s aqueduct forms a highly picturesque object. ”

“ In Continental countries—and especially in France, Germany, Belgium, and Holland—the greatest possible importance is attached to having the command of cheap and adequate water transport, and it seems to have been allowed that there is a natural function for each system of transport—that of the railways being the conveyance of passengers and traffic that will bear a high rate of freight, while that of the waterways is to convey heavy luggage or traffic, of low intrinsic value, from point to point at a low rate of speed. ”

“ One of the advocates of the canal, as against the railroad, remarked that, “very possibly it may be vital, as it certainly is characteristic, for a live American to hurry his person at racehorse speed across the continent; but it certainly is not vital, nor in any respect necessary or expedient, thus to hurry his fuel, his timber, his building materials, his food, nor any very large proportion of his merchandise or manufactures.” ”

“ Whether we regard the magnitude of the enterprise, the importance of the district it is intended to serve, the difficulties and opposition that have had to be surmounted, or the many and varied influences that it is likely to exercise upon the future of transport in the United Kingdom, the Manchester Ship Canal is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable undertakings of modern times. ”

“ When we consider the enormous disadvantages under which the majority of the canals of this country now labour, the great matter for wonder is, not that they do not secure the lion’s share of the traffic, but that they get any traffic at all. ”

“ History is rapidly made in the nineteenth century. It is not in the least discreditable to Palmerston that he should have failed to realise how completely his anticipations would be falsified by events. No one at that time could have foreseen that, in less than thirty years from that date, the Suez Canal would not only have become an accomplished fact, but would have become perhaps the most successful industrial enterprise of modern times; that it would have revolutionised our shipping and transit trades ”

“ The modern processes of excavation of the soil, in order to form or deepen the bed of a waterway, or of the construction of an embankment, in order that a railway or a canal may be carried above the level of the surrounding country, are now so familiar and commonplace, that we are accustomed to think but little of the slow and laborious steps whereby the means of carrying them out have been evolved from the necessities, the experience, and the scientific acquirements of modern times. ”

“ When we consider the condition of the Russian Empire at the time of Peter the Great, the semi-barbarism of its inhabitants, and the comparatively limited resources at his disposal, the work planned and achieved by Peter the Great [99] in the construction of canals is little short of marvellous. It was he who planned the grand scheme for uniting the Caspian and the Baltic with the Black Sea, by the junction of the Volga and the Don. It was he, also, who began the Ladoga Canal in 1718, although it was not completed until the reign of the Empress Anne. ”

“ On land, the cost of haulage is necessarily determined by such considerations as the cost of fuel, the proportions of tare to live load, the character of the gradients, the adaptability of the rolling stock to the traffic, and other elements of a more or less technical description. These introduce so much variety of experience, and such conflict of results, that the cost of transport is seldom or never in any two cases exactly the same ”

“ It has been suggested more than once that the Thames should be made navigable for a much longer distance, and there is, indeed, no insuperable obstacle in the way of the navigation being carried up as far as Oxford. Between that city and London there is only an average fall of about 1 foot in 4100, which interposes no obstacle. The cost of cutting canals through the most obstructive windings of the river would not be serious, and it is more than probable that it would be cheerfully borne by those whom it would be most likely to benefit. ”

“ There is no good reason why the people of London should continue to pay as much for the carriage of their food and fuel from the ship’s side at Tilbury to their own doors as they would pay for its transport across the Atlantic. ”

“ The Panama Canal (projected in 1871, and actually commenced in 1880) is, however, the greatest enterprise of all, and in many respects the most gigantic and difficult undertaking of which there is any record. The proposed national canal from sea to sea, proposed by Mr. Samuel Lloyd and others for Great Britain, the proposed Sheffield Ship Canal, the proposed Irish Sea and Birkenhead Ship Canal, and the proposed ship canal to connect the Forth and the Clyde, are but a few of many notable examples of the restlessness of our times in this direction. ”

“ All other things being equal, the system of transport that is able to afford the greatest average speed will be certain to command the lion’s share of business. There are, however, both natural and economical limits to speed, alike on water and on land. ”