COMMERCIAL HYDRAULICS.
WHEN railways were first introduced, some bold men were found to declare, though to incredulous ears, that, as a matter of fact, the steam-engine would never kill the horse, and that the breed would not die out, in spite of the world ceasing to travel post. But though a remnant thus looked forward to the horse holding his own, it is not recorded that any apologists were found for the continued existence of canals. They, it was universally admitted, must be put an end to by the iron road, and the disappearance of our inland water-ways was only looked upon as a matter of time. Now, however, we are beginning to see that the huge extension of traffic and the whole industrial stimulus caused by the railways, will act with as great effect upon canals as upon the roads, the carriages, and the horses. The only difference is that the effect upon the canals has been somewhat slower. Just as the number of miles of roads open, and of carts and horses, has increased out of all previous pro- portion since the building of the railways, so the water- ways will in the end be enormously multiplied. But though we are content, in spite of our greater skill, with the roads and the horses of our forefathers, we do not find their canals at all up to modern requirements. The feats of engineering performed in the building of the railways have taught us that we may now attempt much more than our predecessors dared, and thus, when we contemplate inland navigation, we are no more content with a narrow strip of water and slow barges, than we should be with a track for pack-horses instead of a highway.. We can no longer submit to the delays and troubles of transfer from ship to barge : we must bring the great ships into the heart of the country, and endow our inland towns with ports and docks Already we have got one huge scheme for a ship-canal which will bring ocean-going steamers under the windows of the cotton depots at Manchester, half completed; and now plans are being launched for doing the same at Birmingham and Sheffield, and for cutting off the ugly angle of Cornwall and Devonshire by a canal from the Bristol to the English Channel, which will allow ships to bring Welsh coal into the South Coast ports without the present detour of near four hundred miles. This last scheme, if it is ever carried out, will indeed be a triumph of Man over Nature. The engineers who advocate one of the two plans for achieving this junction of the seas, declare that the canal they propose need only have two locks, one at each end, and that its waters may be replenished from the sea,—we wonder how the birds and wild animals, hares, and stoats, and weasels, that come to drink at the new river will like the taste of the salt water. The canal is projected to start at Stolford, a Somersetshire village on Bridgewater Bay, a little west of the mouth of the Parret. Thence it is proposed to carry it to Taunton, then to Exeter, and lastly, following the course of the estuary of the Exe, to a place called Langstone Bay, on the Channel and opposite Exmouth. This course, sixty-two miles in length, is by no means the shortest; but it avoids the ribs of hill with which the portions of Somer- setshire and Devonshire to be traversed by the canal are studded, and reduces the deepest cutting to no more than 200 ft. One of the features of the canal is that the pro- jectors propose to utilise, by deepening and widening, the existing canals of the district. Exeter already has a floating basin connected with the sea by a cam' over five miles long and capable of taking ships of 400 tons. This canal will be among those acquired, and will be deepened and widened as may be necessary. The proposed canal, however, will in reality be much more than a widening and deepening of the existing water-ways ; for it will be 125 ft. wide at the surface, 36 ft. at the bottom, and 21 ft. deep,—dimensions which it is stated will allow the passage of vessels of from 1,000 to 1,500 tons. The cost will, no doubt, be great—it is estimated at over £3,000,000—but the promoters of the project declare that the traffic in Welsh coal alone, which will thus be enabled to get to London and the Southern Counties without the expense of railway carriage, will be amply sufficient to make the undertaking pay. London, it is argued, now only draws one-fifteenth of her coal- supply from Wales. If the canal enabled the Welsh colliers to get to London by only travelling 355 miles, or about the same distance as that which the colliers from the North have to traverse, the Metropolis, it is calculated, would take half her coal from Wales,—the steamers in the river using it to replenish their bunkers, and the manu- facturers to run their engines. Such is the proposal to unite the Severn Sea with the English Channel. Un- doubtedly there is a certain charm in the scheme. The thought of Taunton, deep in elm-fringed pastures and apple-orchards, awakening from the dream that has fallen on her since she sent her young men to perish at Sedgemoor, to find the tall ships passing beneath her red-brown towers and unloading their freights at busy wharfs and docks, is indeed fascinating. The country between Manchester and the Mersey is so populous, so intersected by railways and canals already, so sophisticated in every way, that to find yet another mighty engineering work wakes no wonder of contrast. The deep salt-water river winding through the Somersetshire pastures and by quiet, dwindling, inland villages, suggests, however, feelings of quite another kind, and sets the mind at work on a thousand curious problems as to how the new road to the sea will affect the lives of the men and women suddenly set, as it were, upon its banks, who will find the salt stream cutting them off from their neighbours, dividing their parishes, and introducing into their lives such institutions as the ferry-boat, and such pastimes as rowing and sailing. There is another kind of hydraulic work, too, of which we shall yet see endless repetitions, and that is the one just completed by the Liverpool Corporation. Unable or dis- inclined to steal a lake, as Manchester has done, Liverpool has resolved to make one. Perhaps the most beautiful thing in the world is a clear, deep lake, set round about by steep and wooded hillsides. Such a lake the Mayor and Burgesses of the City of Liverpool have been making out of dry land for the past seven years to serve them as a water reservoir, and by the middle of next month their work will be practically completed. A writer in the Daily News has lately described the site of what, when it is finished, will be one of the most striking lakes in England. The surface of the lake will.be 825 ft. above the sea, and from its sides the mountains will rise to the height of from 1,300ft. to 2,200ft. The valley which is thus to be utilised, called the Vyrnwy Valley, is in Montgomeryshire, and is about sixty-eight miles from Liverpool. At present, it contains an in- habited village, with a church, two chapels, shops, an inn, slate-roofed cottages, and a post-office ; and through it flows the Vyrnwy stream, spanned by a stone arched bridge. Soon, however, the life of the village must stop for ever, and the inhabitants be gone never to return. For a week more the life may go on as usual, and then the opening in the great Cyclopean wall, at the end of the valley, where the stones are laid 10 ft. long, 3 ft. wide, and 100 ft. high, and fitted together with cement harder than the stone itself, will be shut, and the water will rise and cover the roofs, and the church-tower, and the houses where men have been born and died. The dead are gone already, and the living must follow them,—either to a village to be built round the new graveyard, where the fore- fathers of the hamlet have been taken and reburied under their own tombstones ; or else to new homes where they will not even be able to look down upon, as often as the surface- of the lake grows clear, the roofs they once dwelt beneath.. No doubt it is necessary that the lake should be made, and no doubt the poor people have been properly compensated. Still, it is impossible not to feel touched at the fate of the villagers. Even men who have voluntarily left it, have a soft place in their hearts for their birthplace, and would hate to hear of its destruction. What must it be to those who are still home-keepers, to have the houses where they were born and where their fathers died, blotted out for- ever from all human recognition ? There is a grey-green lake in the Italian Tyrol formed by a great landslip,. which drowned a whole village, where tradition says the church bells still ring to service. Its fate, however, is not half so moving as that of the village which must die that the great city of the North may drink. To founder amid the wreck of Nature seems somehow less sad than to perish by a cold and nerveless power engendered of the toil of a swarm of human ants. But if we find a pathos in the fate of Vyrnwy, we must not forego a word of delight and admiration for the work which has enabled man to drown the valley,—the great dam built to keep back the waters. People talk as if the- work of the present day was never equal to that of the- past. Probably the great wall of hewn stone at Vyrnwy, sunk 60 ft. below the ground to reach a foundation of rock,. towering 100ft. high, and stretching 1,173 ft. long, has never been equalled even in the great tanks in Ceylon : it has cer- tainly never been surpassed in perfection of masonry. Every stone has been squared and draughted all round, the outer face only being left rough, and in look the courses of the masonry are said to resemble the Great Wall of the Temple at Jerusalem at the Jew's Wailing Place. Before each stone was put in its place, it was carefully washed, se that no extraneous matter might possibly interfere with the stability of the structure. Along the top of the great wall runs a roadway, 17 ft. wide, resting upon arches under which the overflow of the lake will run,—a feature which, we should imagine, must make the wall, when seen from below, a very striking object. Certainly Liverpool is to be congratulated upon having now at last secured—it will take over a year to fill the lake, but except for that, the work is done—a really fine supply of water. We have too long been behind the ancients in the water supplied to our great cities. It is to be hoped that the next genera- tion will amend our fault, and give the people that without which there can be neither health nor comfort,—a free and unlimited supply of pure water. Some day we suppose that London will realise the risk she runs from relying well-nigh solely on the Thames, will create a lake as grand as herself, and will let pure water run to waste in the city as it does to this day in Rome, for that gift of the Caesars has never been taken from the Imperial city. That is a socialism worth having. Unfortunately, however, such things just now do not seem to touch the people.
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