60 HOUSE-EACING IN FRANCE 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE INVASION OF PERFIDIOUS ALBION. 



The history of French horse-racing and its progress is 

 the history of a French invasion of England. We 

 brought our horse-racing to its height of excellence, 

 our thoroughbred horses to as near perfection as pos- 

 sible, by our own strength alone, by judicious impor- 

 tation of Eastern blood and by competition among 

 ourselves. .There was no established ' Turf ' in any 

 part of the world to which we could go to test our 

 horses against antagonists of acknowledged superiority. 

 We occasionally, from the commencement, had tried 

 our Anglo-Arabian or Anglo-Eastern horses, bred and 

 trained on English principles, against the pure ' son of 

 the Desert ' both at home and abroad, and against 

 indigenous foreign horses (as when, in 1825, Sharper 

 made an example of two Cossack horses in a race of 

 fifty miles on the public road hard by St. Petersburg), 

 and always, or nearly always, to our enormous advan- 

 tage, to the establishment of our indisputable supre- 

 macy. But it was different with the French. They, 

 with commendable perspicacity, so far as they w^ere 

 represented by the Societe d'Encouragement, or French 

 Jockey Club, had seen at the outset that they would 

 save some fifty years or more of gradual develop- 

 ment by adopting our ready-made thoroughbred, 

 brought to its high state of perfection by the only 



