We are now in the very throes of the revolution that appears to be destined, before it closes, to secure for most of the great inland centres of population a large share of the advantages that result from being on the seaboard. The location of many of our large towns is difficult to understand. Their prosperity, in spite of their location, is still more unintelligible, on the first blush. Very few of our great cities are on the seaboard. London is over 60 miles from the Nore. Paris is 227½ miles from the sea at Havre, and Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid are each over or nearly 200 miles. In England we have such towns as Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, and Birmingham, situated at long distances from shipping facilities, and flourishing in spite of that disadvantage. But the fact has been recognised as a disadvantage, none the less. Manchester, less unfavourably situated than some of the towns we have named, has resolved to “burst its birth’s invidious bar” by the construction of the ship canal that is now being proceeded with. Sheffield has initiated a project with the same end in view. The people of Birmingham and the Midlands generally appear to have made up their minds to have direct communication with the Bristol Channel. In regard to all of these towns canal facilities of an inferior kind already exist. These, however, are now held to be quite unequal to the demands of modern commerce. They do not give to any town the position of a seaport, and that is the main requirement. The time has gone past when barges of forty or fifty tons, plying on a canal 60 to 80 feet wide, could be seriously put forward as contributing essentially to this end. The canal system of a hundred years ago has been put to the trial, and has been found wanting. We now carry millions where we then carried hundreds and thousands of tons. The great commercial characteristics of our time are to have things done on a large scale, with the utmost practicable facility, and at the lowest possible cost. The existing canal system is quite out of touch with these desiderata. It “cumbereth the ground,” and must be got rid of. But the waterways that still survive may in many cases be made the nucleus of a new and better system, under which the great inland towns of Lancashire, Staffordshire, and Yorkshire may find their lines cast in more satisfactory maritime places. There are not a few people who regard the canal system almost as they might regard the Dodo and the Megatherium. It is to them an effete relic of a time when civilisation was as yet but imperfectly developed. It is placed on the shelf of their memories and sympathies much as the old hand-loom, or the earliest forms of metallurgical processes, might be; and if by accident an old canal happens to cross their path, it is regarded with the same sort of curiosity as would be bestowed upon the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids of Egypt.