ter rivers or in districts accessible from the sea. But at
the moment when England was just plunging into the Seven Years' War the
enterprise of a duke and a millwright solved this problem of carriage,
and started the country on a mighty course of industry which was to
change both its social and its political character. Francis, Duke of
Bridgewater, was a shy, dreamy man, whom a disappointment in love drove
to a life of isolation on his estates in the north. He was the possessor
of collieries at Worsley whose value depended on their finding a market
at the neighbouring town of Manchester; and it was to bring his coal to
this market that he resolved to drive a canal from the mine to the river
Irwell. With singular good luck he found the means of carrying out his
design in a self-taught mechanic, James Brindley. But in Brindley's mind
the scheme widened far beyond the plans of the duke. Canals, as he
conceived them, were no longer to serve as mere adjuncts to rivers; on
the contrary, "rivers were only meant," he said, "to feed canals"; and
instead of ending in the Irwell, he carried the duke's canal by an
aqueduct across that river to Manchester itself. What Brindley had
discovered was in fact the water-road, a means of carrying heavy goods
with the least resistance, and therefore the least cost, from the point
of production to the point of sale; and England at once seized on his
discovery to free itself from the bondage in which it had been held.
From the year 1767, when Brindley completed his enterprise, a network of
such water-roads was flung over the country; and before the movement had
spent its force Great Britain alone was traversed in every direction by
three thousand miles of navigable canals.

[Sidenote: Mineral developement.]

To English trade the canal opened up the richest of all markets, the
market of England itself. Every part of the country was practically
thrown open to the manufacturer: and the impulse which was given by this
facility of carriage was at once felt in a vast developement of
production. But such a developement would have been impossible had not
the discovery of this new mode of distribution been accompanied by the
discovery of a new productive force. In the coal which lay beneath her
soil England possessed a store of force which had hitherto remained
almost useless. But its effects were now to make themselves felt. The
first instance of the power of coal was shown in utilizing the stores
o