That the Caledonian Railway Company have done their duty towards the Forth and Clyde Canal is beyond all reasonable doubt. It is true that they are not themselves carriers on the canal. They are only toll-takers. Their business has been to maintain the canal in efficient condition, and allow any trader who wishes to make use of it so to do, on paying the tolls. This they have done, and, if the traders have not availed themselves of their opportunities, it must naturally have been for adequate reasons, and especially because of changes in the course of the country's business which it is impossible for a railway company to control, even where, as in this particular case, they are directly interested in seeing the receipts from tolls attain to as high a figure as practicable. I reserve for another chapter a study of the Birmingham Canal system, which, again, is "railway controlled"; but I may say here that I think the facts already given show it is most unfair to suggest, as is constantly being done in the Press and elsewhere, that the railway companies bought up canals--"of malice aforethought," as it were--for the express purpose of killing such competition as they represented--a form of competition in which, as we have seen, public confidence had already practically disappeared. One of the witnesses at the canal enquiry in 1883 even went so far as to assert: "The railway companies have been enabled, in some cases by means of very questionable legality, to obtain command of 1,717 miles of canal, so adroitly selected as to strangle the whole of the inland water traffic, which has thus been forced upon the railways, to the great interruption of their legitimate and lucrative trade." The assertions here made are constantly being reproduced in one form or another by newspaper writers, public speakers, and others, who have gone to no trouble to investigate the facts for themselves, who have never read, or, if they have read, have disregarded, the important evidence of Sir James Allport, at the same enquiry, in reference to the London coal trade (I shall revert to this subject later on), and who probably have either not seen a map of British canals and waterways at all, or else have failed to notice the routes that still remain independent, and are in no way controlled by railway companies. [Illustration: INDEPENDENT CANALS AND INLAND NAVIGATIONS IN ENGLAND Which are not controlled by railway companies] 1. River Ouse Navigation (Yorkshire). 2. River Wharfe Navigation. 3. Aire and Calder Navigation. 4. Market Weighton Navigation. 5. Driffield Navigation. 6. Beverley Beck Navigation. 7. Leven Navigation. 8. Leeds and Liverpool Canal. 9. Manchester Ship Canal. 10. Bridgewater portion of Manchester Ship Canal. 11. Rochdale Canal. 12. Calder and Hebble Navigation. 13. Weaver Navigation. 14. Idle Navigation. 15. Trent Navigation Co. 16. Aucholme Navigation. 17. Caistor Canal. 18. Louth Canal (Lincolnshire).