The grand-looking bays and dark browns 

 with which the Royal and Viceregal stables 

 are stocked are not the English or Irish bred 

 horses we would preferably associate with 

 British royalty, but are, a large proportion at 

 all events, importations from abroad. The 

 same applies with equal truth to the animals 

 with which the state carriages of our city 

 magnates are horsed. 



Enterprising and self-denying as our 

 French neighbours have been in their exer- 

 tions to obtain the best of our breeding 

 stock to supply their military requirements, 

 there is necessarily a limit to the price the 

 Republic can pay her home breeders for 

 young animals ; and the French authorities 

 view with impatience and dislike the trade 

 which has been forced upon British dealers 

 in high-class harness horses by the paucity 

 of suitable animals in England. 



In course of his most interesting- and 

 instructive evidence before the Lords' Com- 

 mission on Horses in 1873 (popularly known 

 as " Lord Rosebery's Commission "), Colonel 

 Conolly, Military Attache to the Embassy 

 in Paris, said that the remount officers in 

 France " complain very much of all their 

 best Norman horses going to England for 

 carriage horses. They say directly there is 



