In process of time, the canal owners and lessees managed to more than double the charge for the conveyance of cotton between Liverpool and Manchester, and also to more than double the time for its delivery. They did more; if any of their customers happened to displease or offend them, their goods were put under ban. Canal managers were the trade unionists of those days. Nevertheless, the quantity of cotton carried was six times as much in 1824 as it had been in 1795. The goods traffic of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway commenced on the 4th December, 1830, with a train of eighteen waggons, the weight of each of which was a little over 1¼ tons. The eighteen waggons carried a paying weight of 51½ tons of goods, the tender, water, and fuel weighed 4 tons, and, with the fifteen persons in the train, there was a total weight of 80 tons, which was drawn by an engine weighing 7½ tons, in two hours and fifty-four minutes, just 10½ miles an hour. The development of goods traffic of our first-born English railway, although it was rapid and important, was not so striking as that of passengers; nevertheless, it increased from 1,432 tons in the first month to 5,104 tons in the fourth month. The coal traffic, from which much was expected, was practically _nil_; it did not become an important item of receipts until years afterwards. In fact, the Goods and Mineral Traffic of railways scarcely developed itself in the early period of their history, and, until about the year 1840, the relative proportions of passengers to goods was as 85 to 15. A striking illustration of this fact is afforded by the London and Birmingham Company; in its estimates of traffic submitted to Parliament in 1833, it was calculated that the goods traffic would produce £340,000 in the first year after opening. It barely realised £90,000, and it was twelve years before it had attained the sum of £340,000. But since 1840 the change has been gradually working. In 1847, with an average length of 3,426 miles open for traffic, 16,460,599 tons of goods of all kinds (in which are included minerals) were carried, and 3,709,030 head of cattle. All this traffic may he considered a _new traffic_, created solely through the influence of railways, precisely as the passenger traffic of railways, enormous as it is, is the _excess_ of traffic over that conveyed by roadway. Between 1830 and 1837 it was often predicted that the canals of the kingdom would be ruined by the competition of railways, yet in 1846, seven to eight years after the main lines of railway which would come into competition with canals were opened, the latter were paying the following percentages on their capital:—Grand Junction 6, Oxford 26, Coventry 25, Old Birmingham 16, Trent and Mersey 30! Have canals suffered since then? Certainly not; they carry millions more tons of goods per annum than they did thirty years ago, and if they have to carry at a cheaper rate than formerly, competition