RACING NOT CRUEL. 413 



this country, since I was a boy of fourteen years, and I can af- 

 firm that I never saw a single case of a horse cruelly overworked, 

 to dire extremity, exhaustion, or death on a public established 

 race-course, in my life ; nor a single instance of a hoi'se barba- 

 rously and unmercifully punished, in order to force him to exert 

 himself, a moment after it was notorious that he was doing his 

 utmost. 



I utterly disbelieve that any one else ever saw either thing — 

 unless in the instance of some most rare and ahnost impossible 

 exception. No concourse of people would endure the spec- 

 tacle — no owner of a horse, for his own sake, would ever al- 

 low a jockey to ride again, who punished his horse brutally and 

 needlessly, for reasons which are obvious. 



There is more cruelty practised on the roads, and on trotting 

 courses, daily, in matching horses against time, and over-driving 

 them against one another, than there is yearly on all the race- 

 courses in the world. 



I know no case, and I doubt if one ever occurred, of a race- 

 horse being ridden to death, on an established race-course. 

 There is scarce a year on which two or three trotters are not 

 driven or ridden to death in time matches, on the track or on 

 the road — not a day in which twenty wretched hacks and omni- 

 bus horses are not worked and flogged to death, on the roads 

 and streets of every large city in the United States. And it is 

 safe to assert, that there is more barbarous, wanton, and profit- 

 less torture of punishment inflicted on draft horses, every day, 

 in every capital city whatsoever than in the course of a year on 

 every race-course in the known world. 



And these facts are, or ought to be, very well known to the 

 sleek, legislatorial pharisees, who annually prohibit racing, 

 uot — as Macaulay well observed of the Puritans in regard to 

 bear-baiting — not because racing gives pain to the horses, but 

 because it gives pleasure to the people who uphold it. 



The prices of racers, of high blood and in a high form, as a 

 first condition, and the secondary expenses of keeping up an 

 establishment for the purpose of breeding, conditioning, and 

 maintaining large studs of thoroughbreds, are so great, that the 

 possession of such establisliments is necessarily limited, in all 

 countries, to the wealthiest classes ; and is yet farther confined. 



