280 Gait of the American Trotter and Pacer 



motion is worth making if the horse is at all worth training. Every 

 horse should be able to meet the demands of a down or an up grade 

 while he is speeding along at his best. In the hilly section of France 

 called Perche they used to have a course mapped out for horses old 

 enough to be tested for their capacity of draft at speed. They were 

 trotted at top speed over several miles of road up and down hill. Time 

 was a factor in this test, so that their strength, courage, endurance 

 and action were under a severe strain during the entire course. 



While it is to be regretted that our standard bred horse is not 

 subjected more to the test of weight pulling and thereby would become 

 also a more useful horse by heredity, the great speed attained to-day 

 does in a way constitute a test of strength, endurance, courage and 

 action. Such speed should not be confined to a lone mile on a dead 

 level track, but should be able to surmount the clatter of the hoofs of 

 opponents and the uphill and downhill grades as they may appear on the 

 track. Hence my plan to test a shoeing not only one way of going, but 

 also the opposite way, and to speed the reverse way of the track as 

 well, in order that the test for the balancing may be reliable. 



Rather than take the extreme and unreasonable view that a real 

 trotter will trot under any conditions and with any kind of shoes, it 

 would be far nearer the real truth to hold that a trotter or a pacer 

 will stick to his gait when a proper balance has been established, no 

 matter whether the course is uphill or downhill ; for such grades cannot 

 always be avoided and are, moreover, an advantage. But to claim 

 that one of such conditions might at any time be a carelessly prepared 

 or extremely rough track, which lessens speed and endangers racing, 

 is tantamount to giving harness racing a hard blow, against which 

 respectable men should at all times protect it. The aim should not 

 exactly be to prepare for a lone mile under ideal conditions, but to 

 prepare to meet the excitement and turns and twists of a real race 

 with the noise and dust of the contest to boot. In other words, it 

 seems best and more rational to lay the foundations for balancing 

 on extremely broad lines and to be extremely critical as to what con- 

 stitutes proper balance for each individual horse. 



We have here to consider the comparative effects of uphill and 



