it is necessary for the working population,
who otherwise could not see the scenery at all."

_Answer._ After all your shrieking about what the operatives spend in
drink, can't you teach them to save enough out of their year's wages to
pay for a chaise and pony for a day, to drive Missis and the Baby that
pleasant twenty 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.

4. 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 honorable 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,
harbors 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.

264. The arguments brought forward by the promoters of the railway may
thus be summarily answered. Of those urged in the following pamphlet in
defense 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 every
district penetrated by a railway. Where there is little moral character
to be lost, this argument has small weight. But the Border peasantry of
Scotland and England, painted with absolute fidelity by Scott and
Wordsworth (for leading types out of this exhaustless portraiture, I may
name Dandie Dinmont and Michael), are hitherto a scarcely injured race,
whose strength and virtue yet survive to represent the body and soul of
England before her days of mechanical decrepitude and commercial
dishonor. There are men working in my own fields who might have fought
with Henry the Fifth at Agincourt without being discerned from among his
knights; I can take my tradesmen's word for a thousand pounds; my garden
gate opens on the latch to the public road, by day and night,