Page:A protest against the extension of railways in the Lake District - Somervell (1876).djvu/46

 offer. Of the last the number is now too small to make the destruction of any one of them a light matter.

It is not merely the substitution of one mode of locomotion for another that is involved in the extension of railways in the Lakes. If nothing but the conveyance of passengers were concerned, it might be possible so to construct the line as to prevent it from greatly disfiguring the country through which it passed. Much of the injury which has been inflicted in this way has been due, not to the fact that a railway has been made, so much as to the fact that it has been made in a particular way. A little deviation from the course actually taken, a little additional outlay in making a viaduct or embankment less conspicuous, or a bridge less ungraceful, even the simple expedient of planting an ugly wall with creepers, or hiding it with fast-growing trees, would often have made an immense difference. There has been great and culpable carelessness in this respect on the part of those who have had the power to say whether a railway shall be made or not. It ought long ago to have been made the duty of some department of the Government to see that, wherever the Legislature is asked to confer additional powers of taking land, no needless injury shall be done to the scenery of the district through which the Company applying for these powers, proposes to carry their line. Even in the absence of such a department, a Parliamentary