It is practically impossible to arrive at a correct estimation of the tonnage of goods of different kinds that goes to make up the inland and the external trade of this country. We know that the railways of the United Kingdom annually carry about 280 millions of tons of minerals and merchandise (according to the Board of Trade returns), but a considerable part of this tonnage is duplicated, in consequence of passing over more than one railway. Of the total tonnage carried by railway, the greater part probably goes no farther. It is consumed on the spot, like the coal traffic of London and the minerals supplied to our great ironmaking centres. But a very much larger quantity is carried from inland centres to seaports, and thence shipped for places of consumption at home and abroad. The coastwise carrying trade of the United Kingdom is now represented by 60 million tons a year. The foreign shipping trade amounts to over 70 million tons a year. Only a comparatively small proportion of these quantities is consumed at the ports of shipment. The greater part is carried farther by railway, thus breaking bulk twice—once in moving it from the ship to the railway wagon, and again in removing it from the railway wagon. Much of it has to be carried from the ship in barges, and thence transferred to the railway. All this means loss of time, loss of money, and deterioration of quality, which adequate water facilities should do much to obviate. There is no class of property that has undergone a more remarkable range of vicissitudes than canal ownership. In the early years of the present century, the value of canal companies’ shares was much higher than that of any railway property has been since that time. The price of some canal shares rose to a hundred times their nominal or par value. Enormous dividends were often paid. In other cases, where the navigation had been neglected, the properties were very lightly esteemed, and yielded unsatisfactory results. The Fossdyke Navigation in Lincolnshire was leased about 1840, by the Corporation of Lincoln, to a Mr. Elison for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, at 75_l._ a year! Six years later the executors of the lessee leased it to the Great Northern Railway Company for 9575_l._[28] The Loughborough Canal shares, which were once worth 4500_l._, are now scarcely worth 100_l._; and a still more notable decline is that of the Erewash Canal, whose shares, now quoted at about 50_l._, were once worth fully 3000_l._ There are three great epochs in the modern history of canal navigation, each marked by characteristics peculiar to itself, and sufficiently unlike those of either of the others to enable it to be readily differentiated. They may be thus described:—