British Canals: Is their resuscitation practicable?

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AQUEDUCT AT PONTCYSYLLTE (IN THE DISTANCE).
(Constructed by Telford to carry Ellesmere Canal over River Dee. Opened 1803. Cost £47,000. Length, 1007 feet.)
BRITISH CANALS:
IS THEIR RESUSCITATION PRACTICABLE?
BY EDWIN A. PRATT
AUTHOR OF RAILWAYS AND THEIR RATES, THE ORGANIZATION OF AGRICULTURE, THE TRANSITION IN AGRICULTURE, ETC.
LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1906

The appointment of a Royal Commission on Canals and Waterways, which first sat to take evidence on March 21, 1906, is an event that should lead to an exhaustive and most useful enquiry into a question which has been much discussed of late years, but on which, as I hope to show, considerable misapprehension in regard to actual facts and conditions has hitherto existed.
Theoretically, there is much to be said in favour of canal restoration, and the advocates thereof have not been backward in the vigorous and frequent ventilation of their ideas. Practically, there are other all-important considerations which ought not to be overlooked, though as to these the British Public have hitherto heard very little. As a matter of detail, also, it is desirable to see whether the theory that the decline of our canals is due to their having been captured and strangled by the railway companies—a theory which many people seem to believe in as implicitly as they do, say, in the Multiplication Table—is really capable of proof, or whether that decline is not, rather, to be attributed to wholly different causes.