POPULARITY OF TROTTERS. 127 



who keeps a horse for his own driving, to compete thereon, ac- 

 cordiug to that horse's pretensions to speed or endurance. Nor 

 on it has the milHonnaire, who keeps his regular trotting stable, 

 his private trotting course, and his private trainer, one iota of 

 advantage over the butcher, the baker, or the farmer, who keeps 

 his one fast crab, trains it himself into general condition on the 

 road, and puts it for a month or two, into the hands of Spicer, 

 Woodruff, Wheelan, or some other such tip-top-saw jer, to bring 

 it to its best time, and trot it, when the purse is to be won. 



Trotting, in America, is the people's sport, the people's pas- 

 time, and, consequently, is, and will be, supported by the 

 people. 



^ And, as it does for every thing else, the demand creates the 

 thing demanded. 



Whenever trotting becomes popular, in this sense, in Eng- 

 land, or in Europe generally, the same demand will arise ; anli 

 trotters will be created in abundance, out of the abundant ma- 

 terial which exists in the noble half-bred, and yet more highly- 

 bred, horses of those countries. 



But it is safe to say, that it never will become popular, and 

 that the demand never will arise. 



Even in America, at this day, it is not popular with the 

 wealthier classes and those who assume to be the aristocracy ; 

 but is supported mainly by the people. 



Eegarding it in this light, I must say that it has often struck 

 me as somewhat cockneyish, not to say snohUsh, on the part of 

 American travellers, to go on, usque ad nauseam, wondering why 

 there are not such trotters in England as there are in the United 

 States, and thinking it a great matter, for which to brag over 

 the Old Country, because there are no horses there which can 

 do their mile in the thirties. 



I am certain that if an English traveller should make a sim- 

 ilar rout about the absence of hunters and steeple-chasers in 

 America, where nobody wants them, and should maintain such 

 a cock-crowing, as do some of our newspaper letter- writers, 

 soi-disant horsemen, and Parisian correspondents, on the want 

 of trotters, over the inability of American horses to leap six-feet 

 stone Avails, or twenty-five feet w-ater-ditches, he would be set 

 down, in America universally, as a conceited braggadocio fool 



