"The prodigious additions made within a few years to the system of inland navigation, now extended to almost every corner of the Kingdom, cannot but impress the mind with magnificent ideas of the opulence, the spirit and the enlarged views which characterise the commercial interest of this country. Nothing seems too bold for it to undertake, too difficult for it to achieve; and should no external changes produce a durable check to the national prosperity, its future progress is beyond the reach of calculation. Yet experience may teach us, that the spirit of project and speculation is not always the source of solid advantage, and possibly the unbounded extension of canal navigation may in part have its source in the passion for bold and precarious adventure, which scorns to be limited by reasonable calculations of profit. Nothing but highly flourishing manufactures can repay the vast expense of these designs. The town of Manchester, when the plans now under execution are finished, will probably enjoy more various water-communication than the most commercial town of the Low Countries has ever done. At the beginning of this century it was thought a most arduous task to make a _high road_ practicable for carriages over the hills and moors which separate Yorkshire from Lancashire; and now they are pierced through by _three navigable canals_! Long may it remain the centre of a trade capable of maintaining these mighty works!" The day was to come, however, when it would be a question, not of the additions made to inland navigation justifying the expense incurred, but of the inherent defects of the said "mighty works," the increasing manufactures, and the introduction of still better methods of transport and communication giving to canals a set-back akin to that which they themselves had already given to navigable rivers. {186}CHAPTER XVII THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Contemporaneously with the canal period in England came an industrial revolution which was to place this country--hitherto distinctly backward in the development of its industries--at the head of manufacturing nations, but was, also, to show that, however great the advantages conferred by canals, as compared both with rivers and with roads, even canals were inadequate to meet the full and ever-expanding requirements of trade and transport.