106 HORSES: 



serious ; but it is not all. Unless the facts thus far 

 stated can be set aside, our horses work on the aver- 

 age seven or eight years ; but how do they work ? 

 The collective experience of the country will answer 

 that the work is done at the cost -of frequent inter- 

 ruption, and with an amount of discomfort and pain 

 which "often becomes agony. It is easy to say that 

 much of the evil must be laid to the charge of 

 grooms and stable-men; and perhaps the censures 

 dealt out to these men are not undeserved. They 

 are, at least, outspoken. In the last century Lord 

 Pembroke spoke of grooms as being " generally the 

 worst informed of all persons living." " No other serv- 

 ant," says Mr. Mayhew, "possesses such power, and 

 no domestic more abuses his position. It is impossi- 

 ble to amend the regulation of any modern stable 

 without removing some of this calling, or overthrow- ' 

 ing some of the abuses with a perpetuation of which 

 the stable servant is directly involved." In this state 

 of things the most humane of masters becomes, he 

 adds, an unconscious tyrant to the brute which serves 

 him so well. It is a miserable fact that grooms on 

 their own responsibility are in the habit of adminis- 

 tering secretly to horses medicines the cost of which 

 they pay themselves. It may fairly be said that in 

 every case the remedy is ill-judged, and creates worse 

 mischief than that which it is designed to remove. 

 Among these medicines arsenic, antimony, and niter 

 seem to be the favorites, but the list of remedies is 

 not ended with these. The experience of ages, if it 

 has failed to do more, has impressed on them the fact 



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