In some instances certain towns did succeed in maintaining a distance of several miles between themselves and the canals they regarded with prejudice and disfavour. They anticipated, in this respect, the action that other towns were to take up later on in regard to railways; and in the one case as in the other there was abundant cause for regret when the places concerned found they had been left aside, much to their detriment, by a main route of trade and transport.
Other alarmists predicted the ruin of the innkeepers; protested against the drivers of packhorses being deprived of their sustenance; prophesied a diminution in the breed of draught horses; declaimed against covering with waterways land that might be better used for raising corn; and foreshadowed a detriment to the coasting trade that, in turn, would weaken the Navy, "the natural and constitutional bulwark of Great Britain"--this being a phrase which, { 183}no doubt, was rolled out with great effect in the discussions that took place.
The discovery, however, that canals were likely to be not only exceedingly useful but a profitable form of investment was quite sufficient to overcome all scruples, and even to give rise, in 1791-4, to a "canal mania" which was a prelude to the still greater "railway mania" of 1845-6. In the four years in question no fewer than eighty-one canal and navigation Acts were passed.
So great had the eagerness of the public to invest in canal shares become that when, in 1790, the promoters of the Ellesmere Canal held their first meeting, the shares for which application was made were four times greater than the number to be issued. In 1792, when a meeting was held at Rochdale to consider the proposed construction of the Rochdale Canal, £60,000 was subscribed in an hour. In August, 1792, Leicester Canal shares were selling at £155, Coventry Canal shares at £350, Grand Trunks at the same figure, and Birmingham and Fazley shares at £1170. At a sale of canal shares in October, 1792, the prices realised included--Trent navigation, 175 guineas per share; Soar Canal (Leicestershire) 765 gs.; Erewash Canal, 642 gs.; Oxford Canal, 156 gs.; Cromford Canal, 130 gs.; Leicester Canal, 175 gs., and ten shares in the Grand Junction Canal (of which not a single sod had then been cut) at 355 gs. premium for the ten.