•• CLAYRABJA" AND " CLAYBEALE GRANT.'- 39 



debt? Every reader knows that we are one of the greatest grass 

 lands in the world, and that the area in which these imported horses 

 are crown would not make the extent of grass land comprised in any 

 one of our forty States and Territories. If our sporting and agricul- 

 tural papers had given themselves to instructing their readers during 

 the past twenty years, we could have created, grown, and established 

 a national horse of our own, equal if not superior to anything we 

 now import, and would be able to sell the same animals to any part 

 of Europe for one-half of what we now pay for them, besides making 

 all the profit from our grass lands by such raising, which we now pay 

 out to Europe in hard dollars. 



Another disadvantage we have labored under: a sporting nature 

 had grown and been cultivated by our young men during the war, 

 which settled largely on trotting-horses. The demand for trotters was 

 o-reat, with prospective large returns from their breeding. Hundreds 

 of gentlemen of means, but in every other way unfitted, purchased 

 land and began the breeding of horses. 



Brood stock was selected by prejudice or fancy, without cultured 

 ability for understanding!}' investigating the reputed breedings, through 

 which to rate blood influences for desired results. In short, the name 

 was the governing power, blood and breeding being of minor impor- 

 tance. 



Horses of all classes were exceedingly scarce, and the demand was 

 so great that venturers in breeding, in haste to get rich, thought more 

 of prospective large money returns from their investments than of 

 future advantages to the country through improved blood values. 

 Prejudice swayed the breeding and buying public, so that after twenty- 

 five years of unparalleled production of horses, as to numbers, we find 

 the country flooded with mongrels, scarce worth the raising, and from 

 which we are unable to select a reliable, self-sustaining, reproducing type. 



Our constant importation of stockdiorses from France, Scotland, 

 England, and even German-Prussia, has not mended matters, but has 

 still further mongrelized our bloods, because we have used them for 

 crosses, rather than in breeding each type to itself. 



If the different horses we continue to import have special merit to 

 warrant such importations, why not breed them pure; then with our 

 superior advantages in soil and climate, eclipse our cis-Atlantic neigh- 

 bors in the growing of their own types? Poor America! When will 

 she arise to the privilege and dignity of breeding her own national 

 horse ? 



