[108] When the canal came to be constructed at the point at which it passed Soho, it occasioned him great anxiety through the leakage of the canal banks and loss of water for the purposes of his manufactory. The supply, especially in dry summers, was already too limited; but the canal threatened to destroy it altogether. Writing to Mr. Thomas Gilbert, M.P., on the subject in February, 1769, he said, “The very holes which Mr. Smeaton hath dug to try the ground, drink up the water nearly as fast as you can pour it in.... Let Smeaton or Brindley, or all the engineers upon earth give what evidence they will before Parliament, I am convinced by last summer’s experience that if the proprietors of the canal continue to take the two streams on which my mill depends, it is ruined. I might as well have built it upon the summit of the hill.” After the act had passed he wrote his friend Garbett, “I have seen the testimony of the two engineers, Smeaton and Yeoman, but I value the opinions of neither of them, nor of Brindley nor Simcox (in this case), nor of the whole tribe of jobbing ditchers, who are retained as evidence on any side which first applies for them.” His alarms, however, proved unfounded, as the leakage of the canal was eventually remedied; and in November, 1772, we find him writing to the Earl of Warwick, “Our navigation goes on prosperously; the junction with the Wolverhampton Canal is complete; and we already sail from Birmingham to Bristol and to Hull.”--Boulton MSS. Coming down to a few years later, in 1770, we find his business still growing, and his works and plant absorbing still more capital, principally obtained by borrowing. In a letter to Mr. Adams, the celebrated architect, requesting him to prepare the design of a new sale-room in London, he described the manufactory at Soho as in full progress, from 700 to 800 persons being employed as metallic artists and workers in tortoiseshell, stones, glass, and enamel. “I have almost every machine,” said he, “that is applicable to those arts; I have two water-mills employed in rolling, polishing, grinding, and turning various sorts of lathes. I have trained up many, and am training up more plain country lads into good workmen; and wherever I find indications of skill and ability, I encourage them. I have likewise established correspondence with almost every mercantile town in Europe, and am thus regularly supplied with orders for the grosser articles in common demand, by which I am enabled to employ such a number of hands as to provide me with an ample choice of artists for the finer branches of work; and I am thereby encouraged to erect and employ a more extensive apparatus than it would be prudent to provide for the production of the finer articles only.”