Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/327

Rh cutting canals supplied the requisite means of communication. The gain to industry was both immense and immediate. With three thousand miles of navigable canals all over England, and a race of navigators, or navvies, to manipulate the shallow boats which carried the merchandise from place to place, the problem of communication was for the moment solved.

But if these canals were useful for the transport of cotton goods, yet more invaluable were they to the owners of coal and iron mines, for whom, indeed, they were originally designed. A new importance was now gathering round the coal mines of the North. Through the long centuries that had passed, the vast stores of iron beneath the tread of man had lain unworked, owing to the prevalent idea that it could only be smelted by means of wood, and this was growing scarce with the advance of agriculture. An invention for smelting iron by means of coal revolutionised the whole trade and at once raised that material to take its high place in the modern working world. "It is," says a recent historian—"it is its production of iron which more than all else has placed England at the head of industrial Europe. The value of coal as a means of producing