206 EVILS OF MODERN STABLES. 



doom, would be relieved by insanity. The horse has few pleasures ; but 

 nature makes all life suffer acutely when forced to continue inactive. 

 The creature cannot seek occupation in what young ladies term accom- 

 plishments. It has no power to consume its existence in silent study. 

 Like all animal vitality, its delight is to do, and that is the very thing 

 which the groom insists it shall not perform. It can taste no other kind 

 of pleasure. All created beings have some sphere of enjoyment. Ac- 

 tivity constitutes that of the equine race ; but to prevent an innocent 

 creature knowing the only happy sensation of which its nature is capable, 

 the animal is placed in a compartment; tied up to a manger; while, 

 behind, there sits a man who is specially engaged to chastise the smallest 

 infraction of the prevailing silence of the prison-house. 



It remained for human perversity to conceive a life without a pastime, 

 and vexatiously to impose this terrible fate upon the creature whose 

 existence is devoted to man's service. When in the field, the horse is 

 never idle. The only amusement of the simple animal lies in its per- 

 petual occupation. What a despairing sorrow must therefore afflict such 

 an existence, when dragging through its time under the fostering care 

 of the enslaver 1 Yet how proudly do some intellectual beings boast 

 of their stables and of the ceaseless attention lavished on their studs 1 

 What is it this assiduity realizes to the creature on which it ^s ex- 

 pended? Stagnation to the active, and solitude to the gregarious. 

 Movement draws down punishment, as it were a fault. Any attempt to 

 while away the tedious hours is esteemed "a vice;" sensation must be 

 checked, and feeling; man insists, shall be suppressed. But who, among 

 the millions of intellectual masters, sufficiently understands the quad- 

 ruped over which they all usurp authority, to regard the huge bulk of 

 that endurance as the embodiment of the acutest form of every possible 

 earthly misery ? 



To ascertain how far the foregoing remarks are founded upon reason, 

 let it be supposed that man and horse were to change places, though the 

 two animals, not being alike on the score of comprehension, no trial 

 could be exactly equitable. Restlessness of spirit is the invariable at- 

 tendant upon weakness of intellect. The advantage must, therefore, 

 preponderate upon that side where intelligence might lose a sense of self 

 in the excitement of thought, or where reflection could be amused by 

 passing observation. But, granting all advantages to the human being, 

 be it imagined that, for a single week, man inhabited a stall; shut in 

 from all society ; standing on one spot by day, and lying there by night ; 

 having the same food and the water brought to him at regular intervals ; 

 being obliged to make his meals without turning round; but, all the 

 while, with his nose fastened close to a blank, white wall. After one 



