FOR PEACE AND WAR, 123 



from these kingdoms, chiefly from Ireland, our greatest 

 nursery. Everything concurs in pointing to the present as 

 an opportune period for making a national stand against 

 the nation's insidious and parasitic foe, a foe bred of apathy 

 and ignorance, and fostered in cruel carelessness and censur- 

 able folly. When, alongside such views, we glance at the 

 effect of continental judgment, energy, enterprise, and gold 

 upon their and this country's horses through our open marts 

 and ports for years past, be assured the picture is both a sad 

 and serious one for any patriotic Briton to contemj)late. 

 France and Germany have year by year for a long time taken 

 a majority of the best half-bred mares, nay, all they could 

 get ! Those very mares that properly should have been 

 the seed from which our cavalry not theirs should grow re- 

 mounts. 



We are now — it is a matter of general notoriety — de- 

 pendent upon foreign breeders, and that, save for the im- 

 portations from abroad that fill the high class horse-dealing 

 stables, horses for the ordinary purposes of fashionable life 

 would not he forthcoming at any "price. Happily the 

 enormous prices for high-class horses that scarcity has be- 

 got in this country, has violently assailed the English 

 aristocracy in that most sensitive part of an Englishman's 

 system — his " breeches pocket." This pull upon the ex- 

 chequer and temper of some of our magnates will conduce 

 to making our subject more Aveighty as being so purely 

 personal ; and it is to be hoped that the searching influence 

 of depletion in the purse will stimulate to an exercise 

 of patriotism that, no doubt, only slumbered with the 

 great and enlightened ; and having been once aroused will 

 awaken to a vigorous existence. " Out of evil comes good," 

 and, I think, we shall find a wholesome agitation before 

 long in the senate house of England on this subject of short 

 and inefficient supply of England's Horses for Peace 

 AND War. 



