"I doubt (he said) if Parliament ever, at that time of day, came to any deliberate decision as to the advisability or otherwise of railways possessing canals; but I presume that they did not do so without the fullest evidence before them, and no doubt canal companies were very anxious to get rid of their property to railways, and they opposed their Bills, and, in the desire to obtain their Bills, railway companies purchased their canals. That, I think, would be found to be the fact, if it were possible to trace them out in every case. I do not believe that the London and North-Western would have bought the Birmingham Canal but for this circumstance. I have no doubt that the Birmingham Canal, when the Stour Valley line was projected, felt that their property was jeopardised, and that it was then that the arrangement was made by which the London and North-Western Railway Company guaranteed them 4 per cent." The bargains thus effected, either voluntarily or otherwise (and mostly otherwise), were not necessarily to the advantage of the railway companies, who might often have done better for themselves if they had fought out the fight at the time with their antagonists, and left the canal companies to their fate, instead of taking over waterways which have been more or less of a loss to them ever since. Considering the condition into which many of the canals had already drifted, or were then drifting, there is very little room for doubt what their fate would have been if the railway companies had left them severely alone. Indeed, there are various canals whose continued operation to-day, in spite of the losses on their wholly unremunerative traffic, is due exclusively to the fact that they are owned or controlled by railway companies. Independent proprietors, looking to them for dividends, and not under any statutory obligations (as the railway companies are) to keep them going, would long ago have abandoned such canals entirely, and allowed them to be numbered among the derelicts.