"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." If, for the sake of argument, we leave out of account all the "enormous disadvantages" here alluded to, and assume that the physical difficulties already detailed could be overcome without much trouble or great expense (though this would, indeed, be a prodigious assumption), we should still have the fact that the number of traders in the country who could hope to benefit from any possible system of internal navigation would necessarily be limited to those in certain districts, whereas the railway can be taken anywhere, and be made to serve the interests of each and every district or community in the country. It is true that when commodities can be sent direct from an ocean-going vessel to a works situated immediately alongside a canal, the waterway may have the advantage over the railway; and the same may be the case as regards manufactured goods forwarded in the opposite direction. Of the 235,000 tons of flints, clay and other potters' materials brought into the Potteries district of North Staffordshire during 1910, no fewer than 200,000 tons, imported at Runcorn, Ellesmere Port or Weston Port, were taken by canal to pottery works located on or near to the canal banks. In these circumstances the North Staffordshire Railway Company, who also control the Trent and Mersey Navigation, cannot, as railway owners, compete with themselves as canal owners. In the case of the Aire and Calder, the physical conditions of which are exceptionally favourable, coal can readily be sent from the collieries immediately alongside the waterway to the steamers or the coal ships in the port of Goole. On the Birmingham Canal, also, the traffic between collieries and works, or between works and railway transhipping basins, on the same level, is already so considerable that no great increase could be accommodated without carrying out on the canal a widening {308}which would be fabulously costly, and, also, wholly impracticable, on account of the great iron-works and other industrial establishments which line almost the entire twelve-mile route between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, forming, with their hundreds of private basins, the actual boundary of the canal on one side or the other. To "adapt" the Birmingham Canal to through traffic would produce chaos for the local traffic.