Page:A protest against the extension of railways in the Lake District - Somervell (1876).djvu/77

 Well, it is the 'march of the times.' It will go on, I suppose, as in other quiet pleasant English towns, until all the sweet Calder valley is swallowed up in the smoke of Tophet. They will cut the snowdrop wood down, and cover Heath Common with cheap villas, and make the old hall into an 'institution.' You know how it will be. A river black with filth, and stagnant with foulness, a wilderness of toiling suburbs such as you saw at Bradford; and where the cowslips and the corn grew, the earth will be thick with 'institutions.' There will be a Blind Institution, and an Eye and Ear Institution, an Orthopædic Institution, and a Magdalen Institution, and Mechanics' Institutions; and we shall hear a great deal of the liberality and beneficence of the cotton and iron kings of the place. But will all this compensate one little child for robbing it of its God-given birthright of earth and sky?

I cannot believe it.

Poor little martyrs! There will be no 'swallow twittering from the straw-built shed' for them,—only the American Devil calling father to his hot, hard day's labour. What can they make of it all? What I saw on the Medlock yesterday—such a hideous sight!—yet my husband remembers catching fish there. The gases would kill a fish like a lightning-stroke, now.

And the poor children! It makes me so sad, having some of my own, to think of those who will be born there, with hearts as hungry for nature and truth as mine was; who will never see God's heaven, save through grimy panes and smoke; who will have no sweet cowslip-fields to walk in,—only the defiled pavement; who will grow hard and sour before childhood is over, with the riddle of their joyless lives.