Page:A protest against the extension of railways in the Lake District - Somervell (1876).djvu/86

 in the West Riding, will soon become lost in the smoke that surrounds it. If Mr. Ruskin can save a single tree or stream, he will have done a great deal of good, and if he can purify and educate Wakefield, nothing need appear hopeless to him. It is not given to every town to have a lunatic asylum with 1,400 patients and a goal with 1,300 criminals. Lunacy, as is well known, is spreading out of all proportion to the increase of population, and in the event of the establishment of electoral districts Wakefield might hope for a second member. What might not then be expected from a town whose political history for the last forty years has been so bright, and has justified so well the hopes of those who extended the franchise? We can conceive of a millennium of universal happiness, when no man's house shall be without a buzzer, beer shall be the only available drink, and twenty persons shall sleep in the same round bed.