What my friend says about the Welsh may be true.
But here on this part of the Welsh Border the rivers are exactly what God intended them to be. I have seen no rubbish jammed between the boulders or lying on the sand or gravel of the stream's bed. But I saw last year a cartload of rubbish along a mile length of the Yorkshire Swale, one of the most beautiful mountain rivers in England. I think my friend has put too fine a feather in the hat of Yorkshire, for the Ribble is more a Lancashire river than a Yorkshire river. The Yorkshire people are a brave honest people, but they have, for the most part, no aesthetic sense or eye for beauty, and they arc dese- crators of the countryside. At any rate they have been like that since the Industrial Revolution. Nearly a century ago Bradford turned all its sewage into the river Aire ; and the river as I remember it in the 'nineties was the foulest looking, foulest smelling river in the British Isles. It is somewhat better today. But all its life from a few miles above Leeds downwards has been permanently destroyed. Supposing no more pollut- ing matter is run into the river, supposing that in the future it is allowed to run clear and bright from the hills, it is doubtful if any fish can again live in it. The insects they live on have been permanently destroyed and the necessary vegetable life along with them. One says " permanently." And yet, of course, there is nothing really permanent. Even if there be no such miracle as spontaneous generation, Nature is all the time putting forth feelers. So, as the centuries advance, the little silver and tawny moorland rivulets will slowly send down their life to the rivers that have been fouled and then cleansed of the fouling. It is comforting knowledge to those who can live in the fature as much as in the present and the past. Though there be a bad beginning, there must some day be a
good end. HERBERT E. PALMER. [Sir William Beach Thomas will resume his weekly article on this page in our issue of June 16th.].
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