The Earl of Roseberys Committee. 107 



not in danger : " the two services of the army and navy " going to the deuce ; " the whole agricultural 

 interest on the brink of total ruin ; all domestic servants, and all young people of every class, 

 inferior to their predecessors at some remote unnamed period. We cannot be expected to take 

 a more cheerful view of our position than the contemporaries of Homer, who inform us that 

 " Ajax threw a rock which not two men of our degenerate days could lift." 



In the Session of 1873 the Earl of Rosebery made himself the organ of the numerous 

 parties who despaired of the future of the British horse, and obtained a Committee, from 

 which we have quoted more than once, which sat twelve days, and examined thirty-nine 

 witnesses. The Committee did not venture, except incidentally and by an aside, to investigate 

 the condition of the British turf, the cradle of the racehorse, who is the inevitable parent on 

 one side or other of every useful riding-horse in the kingdom ; perhaps wisely, because no 

 evidence and no report of any committee would or could have exercised any influence over 

 the proceedings of the "master of the situation," the bookmaker. 



The Committee collected facts and figures never before brought together by authority 

 and recorded very contradictory theories. 



It is true that every dealer examined complained in almost acrid tones of the persistent 

 avidity with which that (in every country) detestable person, tlie foreigner, bought up the 

 best English mares; just as the French, Belgian, and Dutch farmers complain of the 1,900 

 cart-horses we imported in 1862, swelled to 2,300 in 1870, and 12,000 in 1872.* 



The cause of the temporary decline in the numbers of English and Irish horses has been 

 explained in the clearest manner in the evidence of some of the horse-dealer witnesses. English- 

 men are very fond of horses, so are Irishmen and Scotsmen too, although they are less 

 given to field sports ; but they are all more fond of profit. It takes four years to bring a 

 half-bred hunter or carriage-horse to market after putting the mare to the horse, and to 

 restore the diminution of numbers produced by a long series of unprofitable sales was simply 

 a question of time. 



It must not be supposed that the horse supply had not preserved a due proportion to 

 the increase of population. As long as there was a duty on horses, the number of duty-paying 

 horses could be ascertained, and it is found that they more than doubled in thirty years; but for 

 a long series of years every riding, driving, and hunting horse, every pony and cob brought to 

 market, was produced at a loss to the breeder. At the same time, facilities for conveyance by 

 good roads, railroads, and steamboats, enabled a vast number of acres that formerly produced such 

 locomotive live stock as colts and fillies to grow more grain, roots, mutton, beef, and pork, for 

 sale in the markets of the metropolis or the great cities of the empire. When droves of well- 

 bred two-year-old colts brought from Ireland to the Midland Counties would only fetch ten, 

 fifteen, and at most twenty pounds apiece, the breeder had every temptation to turn his 

 attention to growing pigs or bullocks. 



Lord Rosebery's committee did good service by supplying facts and figures, thus helping to dissipate 

 an unreasonable scare, and to put an end at once and for ever to the absurd idea of encouraging 

 horse-breeding by forbidding exportation, and thus depriving our native breeders of their customers 

 amongst the agents of foreign powers. 



The returns of the number of horses charged to duty in Great Britain for every year from 1831 to 

 1872, published in the Appendix to Lord Rosebery's committee's report, proved that "the popular 

 notion that there has been a steady decline in the number of our horses in the course of the present 

 century is entirely without foundation, although from time to time a temporary diminution of breeding 



* A few ye.-irs ago John Bull was burned in elTigy by the Flemish labourers, for raising Che jjrice of provisions by his imports. 



