So far has this resuscitation idea been carried that in December, 1909, the Royal Commission on Canals and Waterways reported in favour of the State acquiring, widening and otherwise bringing up to date a series of canals radiating from the Birmingham district, and establishing cross-country connections between the Thames, the Mersey, the Severn and the Humber. The reasons for the decline of the canals and the practicability, or otherwise, of reviving them may thus be regarded as questions of more than merely historical or academic interest for (1) the traders who might benefit from the said revival; (2) the traders who certainly would not benefit, but who, in conjunction with (3) the general taxpayer, might have to contribute to the cost if the State did acquire the canals and failed to make them pay. The "real commercial prosperity of England" has well been dated from the period of early canal development, when artificial waterways began to supplement the deficiencies {295}of navigable streams limited to certain districts and liable to floods, droughts and other disadvantages, and of ill-made roads which even the turnpike system had failed to adapt to the requirements of heavy traffic. In these conditions the movement either of raw materials or of manufactured articles other than those which could be carried on packhorses had, as we have seen, been rendered all but impossible in many parts of the country on account either of the difficulties or of the excessive cost of transport. Canals, constituting a great improvement on any other existing conditions, came to the rescue, and supplied the first impetus to that industrial revolution which the railways were to complete. This was a great work for the canals to have accomplished, and it was a work that was essentially done by private enterprise. Clifford says that "Parliament, by its legislation in furtherance of canals and of agriculture, probably contributed more largely to the national prosperity than by any group of public measures passed towards the close of the last [eighteenth] century." There is here not a word of recognition for Brindley, the Duke of Bridgewater and the other pioneers of the canal movement, or for the private investors who provided the £14,000,000 spent on the actual "furtherance" of canals. Parliament did not inspire, originate or in any way improve the canals; it found none of the money which they cost, nor did it even seek to direct their construction on any such well-organised system of through and uniform lines of communication as would have made them far more useful, and assured them, probably, a longer lease of life. Yet Mr Clifford has no hesitation in giving all the praise to Parliament because it _allowed_ the canal promoters and proprietors to carry out the work on their own initiative, and at their own risk, as the improvers of rivers and the providers of turnpike roads had done before them.