128 THE ARAB THE HORSE OF THE FUTURE 



in England ; and then he prophetically added : 

 ' Some day, perhaps in some future campaign, in 

 which he happens to be brought into direct com- 

 parison with our present trooper, and is found to be 

 going on for months after the latter is hopelessly 

 done up or dead, we may have our eyes opened to 

 his extraordinary merits.' 



This was written before the Boer War. Alas 

 that he should have been so accurate ! To say that 

 the English thoroughbred is a perfected Arab is 

 nonsense, the jargon of the bookmakers ; he is an 

 Arab deteriorated — deteriorated by his being bred 

 for sprinting, and spoiled by base blood. 



In the Leisure Hour (May, 1902), W. J. Gordon, 

 in ' The Horse-Supply of the World,' writes that in 

 the Napoleonic wars the Russian horse (an Eastern 

 horse), lived while the French horse died ; that the 

 only others that stood it were the little Arabs from 

 the islands of the Levant. And he says that in the 

 Austrian army much of the quality of their horses 

 was due to careful breeding, especially in those from 

 Hungary, which had a strong infusion of the Arab. 

 And he shows the excellence of the Arab as a sire 

 by the fact that the small Burmese tat, sturdy and 

 sound, is, since the introduction of Arab stallions, 

 developing into that useful but larger breed, the 

 Indo- Burmese. And he adds that the riding-horses 

 of Persia and Syria (allied races to the Arab, if not 

 pure Arab, for the Arabs conquered all those 

 countries) are better in quality than even the rough 



