ANTIQUITY AND HISTORY OF THE PACING HORSE. 167 



and their herds and their families, as well as their horses, with 

 them. 



This question naturally suggests itself here: "If the English 

 pacer had been the popular favorite of the English people for so 

 many centuries, how did it come that he and his habit of action 

 had been so completely wiped out in one century, the seven- 

 teenth?" This question might be answered in very few words, 

 by saying the people thought they were getting something bet- 

 ter to put in his place. In reaching this conclusion I will not 

 pretend to say the judgment of the people was not right, that is, 

 if they exercised any judgment in the case. "Jamie the Scots- 

 man" when on the throne set the fashion in the direction of 

 foreign blood by paying the enormous price of five hundred 

 pounds for the Markham Arabian. The Duke of Newcastle, 

 when he was young, had personally seen this horse, and while he 

 thought he was a true Arabian, he described him as a very ordi- 

 nary horse in his size and form, and an entire failure as a race 

 horse. It seems that any average native pacer could outrun him, 

 but he carried the badge of royalty, and that was sufficient to 

 make him fashionable, as he was not only the king's horse, but 

 was himself a royal Arabian. The weak place in the character 

 of James L, in addition to his intolerable pedantry, was his in- 

 ordinate ambition to be considered the wisest sovereign who ever 

 sat upon a throne since the days of Solomon. His courtiers, 

 nobility, and all who approached him understood his weakness, 

 and a little quiet praise of the great superiority of the Arabian 

 blood in the horse, over all other breeds and varieties, was always 

 grateful to the monarch, for he was the original discoverer and 

 patentee of that blood. Then and there, in order to praise the 

 wisdom of a foolish king, a foolish fashion grew into a foolish 

 notion that has afflicted all England from that day to this. No 

 humbug of either ancient or modern times has had so long a run 

 and so wide a range as the miserable fallacy "that all excellence 

 in the horse comes from the Arabian." Notwithstanding the 

 thousand tests that have been made and the thousand failures 

 that have invariably followed, from the time of King James to 

 the present day, there are still men writing books and magazine 

 articles on the assumption that "all excellence in the horse comes 

 from the Arabian," without ever having devoted an honest hour 

 to the study of the question as to whether this is a truth or a fal- 

 lacy. This craze for Arabian blood was the primary cause of the 



