There is no district and probably no community that appears to offer better facilities for making the experiment of providing a great inland waterway of this description. Manchester and Liverpool, with their immediate suburbs contain at least a million and a half of souls. But the trade and industry of the two towns are even more important than their population, relatively to other districts. The cotton trade of the world is carried on in this part of Lancashire. Manchester and Liverpool together have obtained and maintained a great repute as the centre of large industrial operations of almost every kind: engineering works, shipbuilding works, alkali works, tobacco factories, chemical and copper works, and many others. Liverpool has to-day a larger export shipping trade than any other port in the world, and is only eclipsed by the Thames in the matter of imports. But this great business of imports and exports is not originated in Liverpool herself. She is only the distributing centre for a very large and a very populous district, and a centre moreover that did not appear to offer to that district the economical facilities and advantages to which it was entitled. The port and harbour dues at Liverpool were heavy and onerous, and the rates charged by the railway companies for the transportation of traffic between the Mersey and the interior of the country were deemed to be much higher than they should have been, having regard to the importance of the traffic. The proposal to construct a canal is by no means a new one. Manchester, as every one knows, has for more than a century and a quarter been the foremost in all plans and operations designed to secure economy and facility of transport. Many years ago it was proposed to convert the Irwell into a navigable river, and this, of course, would have connected Manchester with the Mersey and so with the sea. But the Irwell—a tortuous, narrow, and in many respects unsatisfactory stream—did not readily lend itself to a grand proposal of this kind, and the little that was done to make it a maritime highway was never attended with any real advantage to trade and commerce. The Bridgwater Canal was a larger and more ambitious venture. It also connected Manchester with the sea by the Mersey, as well as with many inland towns by auxiliary canals—Bolton, by the Manchester, Bolton, and Bury Canal; Rochdale, by the Rochdale Canal; Blackburn and Accrington, by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal; Ashton and Huddersfield, by the Manchester and Huddersfield Canal; and so with some other large towns. The truth is that Manchester is, and has been for more than a century, the centre of a vast network of canals, whereby water communication was made possible with nearly every other important town and district in the country. But this possibility was one that could only be taken advantage of to a very limited extent. The canals surrounding Manchester have been of small size and depth, admitting of the passage