118 THE BRIDLE BITS. 



other bits sadly on the increase. Every advocate of a 

 new style can give a very plausible reason for using his 

 favorite torture with a horse. He drives his own horse 

 with some newfangled contrivance, and this is held as a 

 sufficient proof of its excellence. The horse learns to 

 submit to it and seems pleased. Why ? Because he is a 

 creature of circumstances and is glad it is no worse. His 

 very nature and life is slavery and submission to his 

 driver's will and caprice ; and, as from friendly familiarity 

 he knows and likes him, he submits tamely to anything 

 and everything he requires him to do and endure. It is 

 this abiding love for and faith in some men that blind 

 and self-willed girls entertain, as they find to their sorrow 

 w^hen t DO late ; but the horse has no alternative but to 

 submit to physical if not to moral force. 



If the horse has gone well with one bit, another is 

 sometimes added, and wdien he learns to go gently with 

 that, it is praised up as having peculiar virtues, that no 

 doubt are in the horse, not in it. But innovations, 

 changes and alterations, under the title of " modern im- 

 provements," are not always improvements, though they 

 are now all the go, and the actual benefit to the horse 

 and the pleasure and convenience of the driver are often 

 sacrificed to this national rage after something new in 

 fashion and change, not unfrequently for the worse. It 

 is this that tends to spoil horses, for whose management 

 all the neighbors have an infallible remedy. As the ex- 

 perienced Scotchman once said : ^'Everybody con min- 

 age a baud vv'eefe but the mon's goot er. " The best cure 

 for a spoiled horse is to ask a reasjDnable price, and for 

 ^^the baud weefe" a divorce seems to be the most 

 effective. 



