308 ATTACKS ON THE TURF. 
nor on the other hand, others suppressed to the injury of 
his arguments. 
‘The betting,” he says, “of jockeys and trainers, to a vast 
amount, has now become a system extensive, open, and 
avowed. It is no longer the restricted and temperate betting 
which prevailed in former times, on horses in which the 
master and employer of these people had an interest, but 
they must have their books as regular as the boldest gambler 
of the course. Now, here is a system which strikes at the 
very root of all confidence in the affairs of the turf. What! 
the horses of sportsmen to be entrusted to a set of avowed 
gamblers, who may have a direct interest in causing their 
defeat! What confidence can be placed in a jockey on whose 
success in a match with another horse he or his confederates 
may have thousands depending? Will he win in opposition 
to an interest so great? Those who believe so, must have 
a higher confidence in the virtues of Newmarket than our 
knowledge of human nature elsewhere justifies. The first 
admission on record of a jockey betting on the horse opposed 
to that which he himself rode, is the elder Chifney. He lost 
the race, but he justifies himself by saying, that he knew the 
horse he rode was unfit to win. The argument of the jockey 
is not worth the tassel of his velvet cap; and the principle 
contended for needs only a little extension to justify every kind 
of roguery. This very jockey lived to acquire a splendid stud, 
to build houses, to sport his equipage, and to experience the 
revolution of fortune’s wheel, by dying a beggar. But the 
training grooms, more trusted still—what can be said of their 
concern with the gambling speculations, by which their 
interest and their duty have been placed at variance? What 
need of their master-key to guard their troughs from the 
introduction of the arsenic or the sublimate; or of the live 
fishes, to show that the water is as pure as their own thoughts ? 
A few orders of the head groom on the training-ground, a 
few doses out of time of Barbadoes aloes, a gentle opiate from 
the apothecary’s shop, all for the health of the horse, will 
