But the actual purchase of canals _and_ mineral rights would be only the beginning of the trouble. There would come next the question of increasing the capacity of the canals by widening, and what this might involve I have already shown. Then there are the innumerable locks by which the great differences in level are overcome. A large proportion of these would have to be reconstructed (unless lifts or inclined planes were provided instead) to admit either the larger type of boat of which one hears so much, or, alternatively, two or four of the existing narrow boats. Assuming this to be done, then, when a single narrow boat came up to each lock in the course of the journey it was making, either it would have to wait until one or three others arrived, or, alternatively, the water in a large capacity lock would be used for the passage of one small boat. The adoption of the former course would involve delay; and either would necessitate the provision of a much larger water supply, together with, for the highest levels, still more costly pumping machinery. The water problem would, indeed, speedily become one of the most serious in the whole situation--and that, too, not alone in regard to the extremely scanty supplies in the high levels. The whole question has been complicated, since canals were first built, by the growing needs of the community, towns large and small having tapped sources of water supply which otherwise might have been available for the canals. Even as these lines are being written, I see from _The Times_ of March 17, 1906, that, because the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Company are sinking a well on land of their own adjoining the railway near the Carshalton springs of the River Wandle, with a view to getting water for use in their Victoria Station in London, all the public authorities in that part of Surrey, together with the mill-owners and others interested in the River Wandle, are petitioning Parliament in support of a Bill to restrain them, although it is admitted that "the railway company do not appear to be exceeding their legal rights." This does not look as if there were too much water to spare for canal purposes in Great Britain; and yet so level-headed a journal as _The Economist_, in its issue of March 3, 1906, gravely tells us, in an article on "The New Canal Commission," that "the experience of Canada is worth studying." What possible comparison can there be, in regard to canals, between a land of lakes and great rivers and a country where a railway company may not even sink a well on their own property without causing all the local authorities in the neighbourhood to take alarm, and petition Parliament to stop them![11] [Illustration: WATER SUPPLY FOR CANALS. (Belvide Reservoir, Staffordshire, Shropshire Union Canal.) [_To face page 128._ ]