Canals do not appear to have developed many serious prob lems calling for public regulation. A first simple legislative act fixing the rate of tolls for boats was sufficient. Charges were made by distance as on a toll road, and the boats were owned by different private shippers or by common carriers among whom competition prevailed.
§ 3. Temporary wreck of inland water transportation. After the sudden check to canal-building about 1840, most of the existing canals continued to operate, with slowly de clining prosperity, until after the Civil War, when many of them were abandoned. The reasons for their failure can be understood only in connection with the history of the railroads in that period. There was not enough traffic for both water and rail carriers to thrive, and, at every point where canals or rivers and railroads touched or were parallel, railroad rates were cut below average rates, or tem porarily even far below the cost of carriage. The shipping on the Great Lakes was the one form of inland [water trans portation to survive and flourish.
This wreck of the canal and the river carriers ruined the prosperity of great numbers of business enterprises and of whole regions, while artificially favoring other enterprises and locations. In the long run (that is, forty or fifty years after it had been done), especially when traffic had so in creased that the railroads were inadequate to care for it, this was seen to have been unfortunate for the country as a whole. Water transportation has its rightful place along with railroads in a general system of transportation, each agency to be used in the places and for the kind of traffic for which each is best fitted. The restoration and develop ment of our inland waterways is one of the large transporta tion problems awaiting solution in the second quarter of the twentieth century.
canal could survive only by dividing the traffic, taking the lower grades of freight, and leaving to the railroad the pas senger traffic and fast freight. Although in respect to cheap ness, it could not equal the waterways in favored localities the railroad made rapid gains, and improvements in road-bed, rails, cars, engines, and other equipment soon reduced greatly the cost of conducting traffic on the main lines of roads. Be cause. of these qualities railroads soon surpassed in impor tance every other agency of internal transportation. The miles constructed and miles in operation in the United States, by decades since 1830, were as follows (route mileage, not counting double tracks and sidings) : 1 see A. T. Hadley, "Railroad Transportation," pp. 10, 32.
The extension of railroads was so rapid that there was not time for a gradual adjustment of industrial conditions. In many places the resulting changes were revolutionary. The building of railroads in the Mississippi Valley in the seventies lowered the value of eastern farms, ruined many English farmers, and depressed the condition of the peasantry in all western With the lower prices that resulted when the fertile lands of the western prairies were opened to the world's markets, the less fertile lands of the older districts could not compete. Many other changes, of no less moment in limited districts, resulted from the building of railroads. Local trading centers decreased in importance. Villages and towns, hoping to be enriched by the railroads, saw their trade going to the cities. Commerce became centralized. Enor mous increases of value at a few points were offset by losses in other localities.
§ 5. Eras in the railroad problem. The history of rail roads in the United States is closely interwoven with the general economic development, the political ideas, and the public opinion of the nation from 1830 to the present time. Despite the absence of clean-cut unified public convictions on the subject, the entire period divides into fairly well 3 DI this period the mileage abandoned on small and non-paying roads partially offset the new mileage constructed. s See Vol. I, pp. 437, 438, 443.