Page:A protest against the extension of railways in the Lake District - Somervell (1876).djvu/14

6 miles, stopping when they like, to unpack the basket on a mossy bank? If they can't enjoy the scenery that way,—they can't any way; and all that your railroad company can do for them is only to open taverns and skittle grounds round Grasmere, which will soon, then, be nothing but a pool of drainage, with a beach of broken gingerbeer bottles; and their minds will be no more improved by contemplating the scenery of such a lake than of Blackpool.

IV. What else is to be said? I protest I can find nothing, unless that engineers and contractors must live. Let them live; but in a more useful and honourable way than by keeping Old Bartholomew Fair under Helvellyn, and making a steam merry-go-round of the lake country.

There are roads to be mended, where the parish will not mend them, harbours of refuge needed, where our deck-loaded ships are in helpless danger: get your commissions and dividends where you know that work is needed; not where the best you can do is to persuade pleasure-seekers into giddier idleness.

The arguments brought forward by the promoters of the railway may thus be summarily answered: of those urged in the following pamphlet in defence of the country as it is, I care only, myself, to direct the reader's attention to one (see pp. 27, 28.), the certainty, namely, of the deterioration of moral character in the inhabitants of