HORSE-BREEDING A FAILURE. 73 



in order to meet the demands of their festivals and royal 

 entertainments. The highest form of beauty, — the royal form 

 of beauty in horses, — as many of you know, was the horse 

 which had such high action in front that his knees, when 

 brought up in stepping, nearly touched his lower lip, as he 

 marched with his nose curbed in. The royal chariot horses 

 of Egypt had this superabounding high knee action in front, 

 as we admire it in the parade horse of to-day. They not 

 only admired it, but reduced it into one of the facts of their 

 breeding. In other words, the royal horse of the old Egyp- 

 tians, — the horse which drew the king in his chariot, when his 

 captives followed in chains at the rear, — that horse was, as it 

 were, spring-halted in front ; and they bred him so for over a 

 thousand years, a distinct breed, a stock that never intermitted 

 its peculiar royal and kingly characteristics. The gradations 

 of rank, from the Egyptian king down to the soldier in the 

 common cavalry, might have been measured, by one gazing 

 upon their triumphant processions, by looking at the height 

 of the knees of the horse, when brought up, as he was passed 

 in the long review. 



I will pass over all these suggestive reminiscences of litera- 

 ture which would make a pleasant evening's entertainment, if 

 we were seated together around a genial fire, and I could dwell 

 upon them ; but I must come directly to the heart of this 

 question, and the heart of it, from the commercial point of 

 view, is, that breeding is a failure. I maintain that breeding 

 in New England, or breeding in America, is a failure, com- 

 mercially considered. I take it that any business whose laws 

 are so little known, and whose workings as to results are so 

 little ascertained, that you cannot figure out your result until 

 you come to it, and then, in five cases out of ten, find the 

 result just what you did not wish, and what you were not 

 striving to have, — I say, a business that is no better known 

 than that, not only is, but must be, a failure. A business 

 that is known in its modes of operation, in its methods, and 

 in its results, is the only business that has in it the chance of 

 success. Weighed in this scale, breeding in this country is 

 a failure. There is not a breeder that I know of to-day who 

 can tell me what he is going to hav^ in the colt that will be 

 foaled on his farm next May : tell me surely, tell me as you 



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