or dealers in Kentucky and exercise a range of choice 

 relative to the purchase of a saddle horse that would 

 include hundreds of animals, exactly counterable to such 

 person's tastes, preferences, uses or necessities. Those 

 having them to sell would constitute a most remarkable 

 competition for such buyer's patronage, and if one cared 

 to do so, he could within certain limits, almost dictate 

 the price at which he could secure a saddle horse that 

 was exactly what he wanted. 



But this is no longer true. On the contrary, the for- 

 tunate possessor of a saddle horse in these days is apt to 

 regard a would-be purchaser, not only with tolerant indif- 

 ference, but probably also with distant disdain. And when 

 such purchaser fortunately locates a horse that is within 

 striking resemblance of anything that would remotely 

 approximate his wishes, he is apt to find that the owner 

 of such animal, when besought with a proper degree of 

 deference, to designate a price which he will consent to 

 accept for it, that the owner will nonchalantly now-a-days 

 talk easily in terms of thousands, as a few years ago he 

 would have been delighted to have talked in hundreds. 



This is, of course, the inexorable result of the immut- 

 able law of supply and demand. And it probably in part 

 accounts for the fact that saddle horse riding is now enjoy- 

 ing the degree of prestige and popularity by which it 

 unquestionably is surrounded. When things become diffi- 

 cult to secure, everybody wants them. Since saddle horses 

 have joined the small coterie of exclusive luxuries, costly 

 and difficult to attain, everybody rides. The ownership 

 and use of a saddle horse now carries with it a sort of dis- 

 tinction, and marks one as being the fortunate possessor of 

 a something impossible of acquisition by his or her less 

 fortunate fellow mortals. Hence, saddle horse riding is 

 the thing. And so just as the law of supply and demand 

 continues its uninterrupted sway, so the law of compen- 



Albert W. Harris, 

 Director 



-nnm 



11 



