242 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



to prove in this brief abstract of my talk, that there is not a thing which 

 civilized man eats, drinks, wears, or uses, aside from wild spontaneous prod- 

 ucts of nature, in this country, which the horse has not helped, directly or 

 indirectly, to produce or transport for the use of man. Myriad dishes to 

 tempt the appetite are prepared from the grains, meats, fruits and vege- 

 tables produced in part by his labors. The same is true of our artificial 

 drinks. You cannot even take a drink of water in all the United States 

 without being under obligations to the horse, without you get down on 

 your hands and knees and drink out of the spring. What an amount of 

 horse power there is in cider, all the way from the planting of the 

 apple seed to the straw through which the boys delight to sip it from 

 the vat. The labor of the horse runs through ever}^ thread of every gar- 

 ment worn by this audience today, whether of wool, cotton, linen, silk or 

 shoddy. There is nothing of wood, iron, stone, brick, mortar, or glass, 

 composing this immense building, that the horse has not helped to pro- 

 duce or place upon the ground. 



The same is true of every home and building in all the land. He has 

 helped to construct every rod of our thousands of miles of railroads, of 

 our millions of miles of common roads, and our hundreds of millions of 

 miles of fences, and our schoolhouses also, and churches, and our factor- 

 ies and all they produce. He plows about 200,000,000 acres annually. 

 He drags and sows and cultivates and reaps and mows it, and his labor 

 is in every one of the five billions of bushels produced, and in every one 

 of the fifteen billion dollars worth of total annual products of this 

 immense land. He contributes a service too great to be measured in dol- 

 lars and cents, in his efforts for the comfort, convenience and happiness 

 of man. If ''He who causes two blades of grass to grow where but one 

 grew before is a public benefactor," how much more is it true of him who 

 causes two smiles to grow where but one grew before? And this has 

 been the mission of the horse throughout all the ages of his domesti- 

 cation. 



THE PRESENT COXDITION OF THE HORSE BUSINESS. 



In this brief summary I have tried to show how far the horse is a factor 

 in the civilization of today. How stupendous is the work? How is its 

 accomplishment possible? You say by machines, the result of the 

 inventive genius of man. But machines can do nothing without motive 

 power. Aside from man himself, the horse furnishes the great bulk of 

 that power. With this array of facts before us, what shall we think of 

 the hue and cry that "the horseless age is upon us;" "The horse is about 

 to become extinct." Is it not the veriest nonsense in all the world? 

 Granting that there are no limitations to the possibilities of the human 

 mind, is it not most unlikely that a substitute for the power that over- 

 shadows all others in amount and infinite variety of application can be 

 devised in our day or our children's day? Old age, neglect and abuse, 

 the call for hides, for glue stock, for canned beef and dried beef, are fast 

 thinning the equine ranks to a point where the supply will be less than 

 the demand. With returning prosperity, the demand must increase. 

 Where are the colts to supply the places of the horses now in use? 

 Nowhere. They are not born yet, and they can't be raised as soon as 



