138 THE HOESE OF AMERICA. 



[evidently a misprint and should read "thirteen" instead of 

 "sixteen"]. He who has a good riding horse never employs him 

 lor draft; which is also the less necessary, as journeys are for the 

 most part made on horseback. It must be the result of this, 

 more than of any particular breed in the horses, that the country 

 excels in fast horses, so that horse races are often made for very 

 high stakes." Such horses often sold for sixty dollars in our 

 modern money. The question of the pacers of Philadelphia will 

 be considered more at length in the chapters devoted to the his- 

 tory of the pacer. 



NEW JERSEY is not known to have made any direct importa- 

 tions of horses from the old country. Lying between New York 

 on the east and Pennsylvania on the west, she had abundant op- 

 portunity to get her supply of horses from her neighbors on 

 either side, to say nothing of the overflow from Virginia about 

 1669. Like all the other colonies, as early as 1668 her horses 

 were ordered to be branded and then suffered to roam at large 

 and find their own living. Not much attention seems to have 

 been given to the idea of improvement in the size and quality of 

 the stock till 1731, when it was provided by law that all colts of 

 eighteen months old, running at large and under fourteen hands 

 high, should be gelded. I have not made any attempt to get at 

 the exact average size of the Jersey horses, nor to ascertain the 

 ratio of pacers among them, for we know the environments and 

 the sources of supply, and in knowing these we know just what 

 the Jersey horses were a large majority of them were pacers and 

 they were not over fourteen hands high. 



The statutes of this colony, enacted 1748, furnished the first 

 real evidence of record, with one exception, going to show that 

 pacing arid trotting races, as well as running races, were the com- 

 mon amusement of the people in the first half of the last cen- 

 tury. They were so common, indeed, that the legislative authori- 

 ties declared them a nuisance and restricted them to certain days 

 in the year. That this was not a "moral spasm," as some might 

 call it, that had seized the legislative authorities of that particu- 

 lar year, is evident from the fact that, afterward and from time 

 to time, this statute was amended, and always in the direction of 

 greater restrictions and greater severity. This is sufficient evi- 

 dence that the moral sense of the community sustained the law- 

 makers in pronouncing it a nuisance, to be abated. It is not 

 probable that pacing and trotting races were any more common 



