Another set of scruples was thus dealt with by Richard Whitworth—himself a canal enthusiast—in his "Advantages of Inland Navigation" (1766):—
"It has been a common objection against navigable canals in this Kingdom that numbers of people are supported by land carriage, and that navigable canals will be their ruin.... I must advance an alternative which would free the carrier from any fear of losing his employment on selling off his stock of horses, viz.:—That no main trunk of a navigable canal ought reasonably to be carried nearer than within four miles of any great manufacturing town, ... which distance from the canal is sufficient to maintain the same number of carriers, and employ almost the same number of horses, as usual, to convey the goods down to the canal in order to go to the seaports for exportation.... If a manufacturer can have a certain conveniency of sending his goods by water carriage within four miles of his own home, surely that is sufficient, and profit enough, considering that other people must thrive as well as himself, and a proportion of profit to each trade should be the biassing and leading policy of this nation."
In some instances certain towns did succeed in maintaining a distance of several miles between themselves and the canals they regarded with prejudice and disfavour. They anticipated, in this respect, the action that other towns were to take up later on in regard to railways; and in the one case as in the other there was abundant cause for regret when the places concerned found they had been left aside, much to their detriment, by a main route of trade and transport.
Other alarmists predicted the ruin of the innkeepers; protested against the drivers of packhorses being deprived of their sustenance; prophesied a diminution in the breed of draught horses; declaimed against covering with waterways land that might be better used for raising corn; and foreshadowed a detriment to the coasting trade that, in turn, would weaken the Navy, "the natural and constitutional bulwark of Great Britain"—this being a phrase which, no doubt, was rolled out with great effect in the discussions that took place.
The discovery, however, that canals were likely to be not only exceedingly useful but a profitable form of investment was quite sufficient to overcome all scruples, and even to give rise, in 1791-4, to a "canal mania" which was a prelude to the still greater "railway mania" of 1845-6. In the four years in question no fewer than eighty-one canal and navigation Acts were passed.
So great had the eagerness of the public to invest in canal shares become that when, in 1790, the promoters of the Ellesmere Canal held their first meeting, the shares for which application was made were four times greater than the number to be issued. In 1792, when a meeting was held at Rochdale to consider the proposed construction of the Rochdale Canal, £60,000 was subscribed in an hour. In August, 1792, Leicester Canal shares were selling at £155, Coventry Canal shares at £350, Grand Trunks at the same figure, and Birmingham and Fazley shares at £1170. At a sale of canal shares in October, 1792, the prices realised included—Trent navigation, 175 guineas per share; Soar Canal (Leicestershire) 765 gs.; Erewash Canal, 642 gs.; Oxford Canal, 156 gs.; Cromford Canal, 130 gs.; Leicester Canal, 175 gs., and ten shares in the Grand Junction Canal (of which not a single sod had then been cut) at 355 gs. premium for the ten.
The spirit of speculation thus developed led to the making of a number of canals which had no real prospect of remunerative business, were commercial failures from the start, and involved the ruin of many investors. Canals of this type are still to be found in the country to-day—picturesque derelicts which some persons think the State should acquire and put in order again because it is "such a pity" they are not made use of.
Dealing with the general position as it was in 1803, Phillips wrote in his "General History of Inland Navigation" (4th edition):—"Since the year 1758 no less than 165 Acts of Parliament have received the royal assent for cutting, altering, amending, etc., canals in Great Britain, at the expense of £13,008,199, the whole subscribed by private individuals; the length of ground which they employ is 2896½ miles.... Of these Acts 90 are on account of collieries opened in their vicinity, and 47 on account of mines of lead, ore, and copper which have been discovered, and for the convenience of the furnaces and forges working thereon."
Among the more typical of the canals, in addition to those already mentioned, were—the Grand Junction Canal, connecting the Thames with the Trent, and thus with both the Mersey and the Humber; the Thames and Severn Canal; the Ellesmere, connecting the Severn with the Dee and the Mersey; the Barnsley Canal (of which Phillips says: "The beneficial effects of this canal, in a rich mineral country, hitherto landlocked, cannot fail to be immediately felt by miners, farmers, manufacturers and the country at large"); the Kennet and Avon (opening, according to the same authority, "a line of navigation, sixteen miles in length, over a country before very remote from any navigable river"); the Glamorganshire Canal ("has opened a ready conveyance to the vast manufactory of iron established in the mountains of that country"); the extensive network of the Birmingham Canal system; the Shropshire Union, which connects the Birmingham Canal with Ellesmere port, on the Mersey, and has branches to Shrewsbury, Llangollen, Welshpool and Newtown; and the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal. To the last-mentioned, constructed under an Act of Parliament passed in 1791, Baines alludes as follows in his "Lancashire and Cheshire":—
"The River Irwell flows directly down from Bury to Manchester, and the river Croal, which flows through Bolton, joins the Irwell between Bury and Manchester; but neither of these streams was considered available, by any amount of improvement that could be given to it, for the purposes of navigation. They are both of them very impetuous streams, occasionally sending down immense torrents of water, but at other times so shallow as not to furnish sufficient depth of water for the smallest vessels. Instead, therefore, of wasting time and money upon them, a canal was cut at a considerably higher level, but following the general direction of the river Irwell."